Considering A New Financial Planning Process

First Command made made many strives to update its tech stack and modernize it's services to better meet the needs of their existing clients and to make themselves more appealing to younger military members. In part of this effort First Command evaluated and decided to bring on a tool to streamline:

1. The way Advisors receive and update client financial information
2. Changes to how accounts are opened
3. Stretch goal: modernizing the financial planning process to focus on the client's financial goals

While these are the main reasons for bringing the tool, this would have large impacts on the company's CRM tool, compliance processes, account opening processes, client-facing financial app, which would impact how Advisors and clients would communicate.

Workshop Overview

I worked with the Financial Planning department to help them understand the Advisors' current processes demonstrate potential benefits and to receive Advisor feedback on three primary aspects impacted by the initial rollout: data aggregation proposal generation and new account opening.

Financial Planning's goal was to get feedback on the out of the box solution offered by the third party to minimize and focus our development efforts. However, to understand the Advisor's goals we reviewed the current processes (which was a research effort to prepare for the workshop), reviewed pain points as a group, the Advisors created their ideal processes in breakout groups, and finally the Advisors rated the importance of the proposed changes.

It was common XD practice at First Command to conduct Impact and Feasibility sessions so Product Management would understand priority of features and better understand the Advisor's perspectives.

Data Aggregation

This was a longstanding issue that the UX team has supported at First Command that exists across all of financial services. There are a lot of client related data that is required for both regulatory requirements and data that allows the company to better understand its clients and their financial well-being.

I previously assisted this effort while I was a UX Lead when I co-led a week long design sprint/ RITE study and our UX Research manager later conducted a workshop to support. A demo was presented from a developer on a working prototype that Advisors unanimously responded, "I need this next week."

However, a benefit of this new provider allowed automation to share financial details via account linking on its platform, and has the potential for improved integration with First Command's Financial Service app and its Financial Planning tool. This is a massive benefit as >updating details was a largely manual process that we identified took an average of 8 hours.

As all current client data was manually updated by Advisors and their assistants, their big concerns was detail around when were things last updated, how to have a smoother process for updating data held outside of the company, and communicating financial details relevant for military members, which is often not a focus with many popular financial third party tools.

Proposal Generation

First Command digitized their compliance processes when they instituted work-from-home during Covid. The vendor we partnered with has a platform for opening new accounts alongside an internal process that effectively duplicated this process.

Based on Advisor feedback, the business agreed to prioritize connections in the tool to eliminate double work. This new process also allowed Advisors to recommend more customizable financial accounts that have dedicated portfolio managers who can walk clients through the many options, the Advisors wanted clear instructions on how to engage with them throughout their client engagement process.

Account Opening

First Command's process requires a compliance check before an Advisor can recommend or sell a financial product to ensure they are meeting their fiduciary responsibilities.

The Advisors' feedback echoed many sentiments we've received in other tool rollouts that include more training opportunities, support to assist while advisors are engaged with clients, and immediate feedback if a potential recommendation would not pass an approval process or is missing information that compliance requires.

Preparing for the rollout

I worked with the PM and business stakeholders to map out our updated processes to identify dependencies on different tools in our processes and to improve onboarding without over-burdening the company's training department.

I also identified an opportunity to improve the legibility, accessibility, and learnability of a UI element that would be a quick win in preparing our CRM to be better integrated with the new tool. Our CRM is a critical junction where Advisors can service the clients. I worked with various PMs, the training department, senior and junior Advisors, and our UX writer.

Many of the links are referred to with multiple terms depending on the office or department, which created a significant amount of cognitive load for new Advisors, on top of the original design not meeting standard accessibility (small text, no spacing between elements causing a higher likelihood of misclicks and illegibility). I worked with experienced and junior Advisors to understand how they internally refer to those actions in order to make the copy less product-specific and more aligned with their day to day tasks.