Altruist is an all-in-one platform for financial advisors to manage their business and clients. In 2019, Altruist made a splash by becoming the first product to offer Advisors the ability open investment accounts for their clients digitally. Onboarding new clients to Altruist was effortless.

By 2021, Altruist added a slew of features which started to slow down the onboarding process for Advisors and their clients. I was a part of an exciting project to consolidate and simplify the account opening process.

Advisors need to go through many steps to onboard a new client. They need to open multiple investment accounts, link bank accounts, transfer funds, and collect signed authorizations. With its redundant steps, contingent tasks, and lack of visibility, the onboarding process on Altruist had become painfully slow. It started to strain the advisor-client relationship and slow down a core piece of Altruist's revenue model.

With a large amount of pre-existing customer and internal feedback, we had some inclinations on how we might improve the account opening process, but we still had a lot of open questions. We kicked off the project with an affinity mapping exercise in order to synthesize existing feedback and uncover any major themes.

As part of our preliminary research, we also met with cross functional stakeholders from customer support, sales, product, and other departments to review the onboarding journey. We asked them to pinpoint the issues in a user journey flow, so we could start to narrow in on the bottle necks. This exercise also helped us get buy in from internal stakeholders on the importance of this project.

As we dove into the problem space, 3 problems became very clear:

1. Repetitive and redundant — an advisor typically opens 2 to 3 brokerage accounts for each client and were required to complete the same tasks over and over again for each account, leading to frustration and wasted time.

2. Too many touch points with clients — advisors needed to wait for their clients to complete one onboarding step before initiating the next onboarding step, often needing to reach out to remind their client to complete certain tasks.

3. High churn and expenses — advisors were moving or keeping accounts on other products, especially for their older, less tech-savvy clients. The customer support team was overwhelmed with the amount of tickets addressing customer's confusion with the account opening and funding process.

There are always many questions when starting a project, so we tried to narrow in on the question that answered them all. If we could could create a bundle of all onboarding steps in one workflow, we could give a lot of time back to advisors and bring assets on to the Altruist platform much quicker.

In order to prepare for user interviews with advisors, I got to work on the designs. I organized collaborative workshops with other designers and key stakeholders to review early explorations for consolidating the account opening process.

Advisors and clients could only open one account at a time, filling out nearly the exact same application for every single account. We believed giving advisors the ability to open multiple accounts with one application and one client signature was the foundation for consolidating the account opening process.

Advisors were required to wait for their clients to complete the investment account applications in order to initiate a transfer request of assets from existing outside accounts. Especially since this is a transfer request that the client needs to approve, we thought it best to include this in the account bundle.

Linking a bank is a requisite for many tasks in Altruist. Yet, bank linking could only be done by clients, after an account was opened. This placed a lot ownership on the client, and when a client did not link their bank account, it was a huge bottleneck to other onboarding tasks. With this, we looked to give advisors the ability link banks on behalf of their clients.

Advisors typically manage all transfers in an out of their clients accounts, and need a transfer authorization to do this. The final piece we explored adding to the account bundle was the ability for clients authorize advisors making transfers with their Altruist accounts.

In part of our research,  we uncovered a lot of feedback from advisors around adding their brand and personal touch to the client onboarding process. We explored adding a chat-like guide to each step of the client onboarding process to make the client experience feel more connected to their advisor.

After many iterations, we were ready to share a high-fi prototype with advisors. In addition to collecting general feedback and testing usability, we had 3 research goals:

1 — Validate the addition of these features in the account opening process
2 — Solidify where advisors want these features to be in the account opening process
3— Define advisors’ expectations of the client experience in the account opening process

We got a lot of positive feedback on the core functionality of the designs from advisors, but there was room for improvement. Before handing off to engineers, we modified the designs with a focus on further reducing repetition.

It was clear that advisors wanted their clients to do less work. We learned in our research that most advisors fill in all of their clients' details for onboarding, so we decided to create a review screen that combined the 32 questions around client's personal details into one screen. We saw a risk of creating a lot of cognitive load on one page, but were confident this was the right direction given how rare it is for clients to actually enter this information themselves.

The team has taken an iterative approach to building these features and has released multiple account opening, account transfers, and bank links. Transfer authorizations is coming in Q3 2024. It's now been 4 months since releasing the first two features and numbers have been really positive. We expect all of these numbers to continue to grow as feature adoption increases.

— The number of open brokerage accounts has grown by 58%
— The amount of time to fund open accounts was reduced by 11%
— The number of brokerage accounts per client household increased by 6%
— The ratio of account opening tickets per brokerage accounts reduced by 15%
— Despite adding a lot more functionality, the amount of time to open an account has stayed the same

The key to the success of this launch was bringing in stakeholders from other teams into the early stages of the project. It helped us pinpoint the bottlenecks in the onboarding journey, iterate quickly, test viable solutions, and deliver something impactful.

Although this project has been successful so far, it has only made it more clear the account onboarding process needs more consolidation. Bank linking and transfer authorizations are right around the corner, but there is a need to add even more steps to the onboarding process. To push the success of this project further, we are in the discovery phase of a project to allow advisors to add a fee billing schedule or apply an investment portfolio in the onboarding process.