FormulaFolios Account Monitoring Discovery

Overview & Background

FormulaFolios Investments (FFI) is an investment firm that services independent advisors and advisory firms. FFI is a bit unique in that it offers a digital platform for its advisors. This digital platform includes the “Advisor Portal” (AP), which is the primary web application for financial advisors. The primary purpose for AP is to provide advisors with essential documentation and open accounts digitally for their clients.

The Problem

Now that we have allowed users to open accounts through AP, we now have to provide a way for them to view account details and monitor these accounts. However, we needed to know a little bit more about what our users wanted out of this experience. These are the main things we needed to determine:

• How do advisors currently view their clients’ accounts? What does this adoption process look like?

• When viewing their clients’ accounts, what information is most important to the advisor?

• What pieces of information can be hidden verse immediately visible on the initial interaction?

• How do clients access and view their account information? What does this adoption process look like?

The Process

• Split up this study into two surveys with two different goals:

  • 1. Determine what advisors care about when it comes to looking at both all client’s accounts and a single household account

  • 2. Determine how clients monitor their accounts

• Write the script, including: determining goals, writing out questions, determining any hide/show logic.

• After approval from the business and product team, create and send out the survey. We used PaperForm for these surveys.

• Create key takeaways and a results overview to share with both the business and product team, and to apply to the design.

The Deliverables

• Survey 1:

  • Script

  • Key Takeaways

• Survey 2:

  • Script

  • Key Takeaways

The Solution

Through our research, we learned a lot about how advisors and their clients (who we call investors) access, view, and monitor their accounts. These key findings were critical to creating these new experiences.

• Advisors have issues with the existing account monitoring platform that will need to be addressed in this new product, including: lack of accuracy, seamless viewing experience, easy way to find accounts

• These account attributes were most valuable: value, model/allocation, performance since inception, name

• Clients don’t always like to create their own logins to view account information, so we need to allow advisors to create a login for them

• Clients want their accounts from all custodians in a single place