Financial Fund Management Portal

A data repository application which provides easy access to key performance metrics and compliance status for financial fund managers

 

My Role

Lead Designer—Discovery Research, Design

Team

Project Manager — Patrick M.

Business Analyst — John G.

The Problem

Financial fund managers are responsible for several areas of oversight including tax compliance, shareholder reporting, and forecasting. Managing these tasks and workflows can be extremely time consuming when there are several disparate sources for key data points.

Our team was engaged by the CFO of a private investment management firm, requesting better visibility in these key areas of fund reporting, in order to improve the existing workflow which required users to manually download and compare reports across multiple applications.​​​​​​​

Research

 

After facilitating a kickoff meeting with Project Managers and business stakeholders, I began research sessions to understand the existing workflow and needs of the user groups we identified: CFO, Tax Directors, Fund Managers, and Data Preparers.

I conducted interviews with representatives from each identified persona to understand their processes, needs, and pain-points, and documented these as Journey Maps. These show key daily tasks, as well as any associated emotions or feelings.

While there are several individuals involved with the typical daily responsibility of fund management, we found that many of the user needs, frustrations, and areas for opportunity overlapped greatly between personas. This allowed us to focus our approach for the first delivery on the Tax Director persona.

Some key focus points were identified for our application from our interview:

  • Painpoint: Aggregating fund metrics: “I wish there was a quicker way to get fund data. This always takes such a long time”

  • Painpoint: Frusration associated with reviewing fund documents: “Reviewing can be frustrating when a report you’re dependent on is wrong or incomplete”

  • Opportunity: Provide easy access to compliance status

  • Opportunity: Ensure data validity for fund metrics across disparate sources

Concept Vision

 

Focusing our initial release on the Tax Director allowed us to concentrate our efforts on providing two major features most relevant to their responsibilities and duties: simplified and aggregated fund metrics, and accurate compliance delivery status. I then designed initial wireframes in order to review and validate structure, and feasibility of these features with the team.

Home/Landing Page

The primary purpose of the home page is to orient the user on the most important items. For the tax director, these items are data requests, as well as Compliance Delivery Status. These items are presented chronologically in order to surface the most recent and relevant information to the user. The user can also navigate to the Funds tab in order to view fund related data

 
 

Fund List Page

With most recently viewed funds appearing first, the user can utilize the list page to navigate to any assigned funds in order to view more details

Fund Details

The structure of Fund Details was a result of continuous collaboration with Project Managers and business stakeholders to identify the pieces of fund details which are most valuable to the Tax Director, such as specific attributes and documents frequently accessed or requested

 

Iteration & Final Concepts

 

I sought to craft a visually appealing dashboard for fund details. Further collaboration with our business analyst/subject matter expert on fund management provided insight on the relationship between fund attributes, as well as possible use cases. This allowed me to design a component which visually represents the detailed breakdown of the data, while maintaining a high level of readability.

Bous Feature: Data Explorer

After completing requirements around the initial scope, we felt there was another opportunity for us to deliver additional value to the client, based on user feedback around the existing workflow requiring

Leveraging the data already provided to EY, I proposed a module which allows users to compare data across funds in a single view. This allows users to eliminate the need to download several spreadsheets from disparate sources in order to compare data across multiple funds.

Attributes: Custom designed component

Attribute tiles allow users to understand the breakdown and relationship between key metrics at a glance

Data Explorer: Workflow Enhancement

Users informed us that the most common next steps after accessing fund data is manual creation of a report.

Data Explorer was designed to allow users to create custom reports which can be exported, thereby increasing efficiency in their existing workflow

Outcomes & Takeaways

 

Our proposed solution was approved by the client and was developed shortly thereafter. We received specific praise regarding the clarity, ease of use of the application, as well as the additional value we were able to discover and present.

Time Savings

Users of this application are able to save at least an hour of data hunting and evaluation per week.

Scalable

The application was also abstracted and implemented for use with other clients who share similar needs.