Robo Advisor - Portfolio proposal

What is a Robo Advisor?

A passive investing product that generally sorts customers into a pre-defined portfolio based off of their financial goals and timeline. This product is great for people with less experience in investing, who don’t feel comfortable placing their own trades, or more experienced investors looking to set it and forget it. Learn more here.

What is a Portfolio Proposal?

Once we have understood a customer’s willingness and ability to take on risk, we can sort them into a predetermined portfolio. The portfolio proposal provides details such as allocation, ETF (Exchange Trade Fund) information, and the institution’s methodology.

 
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My Role

  • Defining design strategy

  • Collaborating with our Registered Investment Advisor team to understand what information is critical to provide customers.

  • Coordinating with content strategy, brand strategy, product, and UX research partners to create materials for concepts tests with varying levels of moderation.

  • Getting feedback from customers, peers, and our leadership team.

  • Mitigating feedback within the experience.

  • Overseeing the design of a downloadable PDF of the portfolio proposal

 

My Approach

The portfolio proposal is a critical point in a customer’s onboarding to the Robo Advisor product. It is imperative that customers feel comfortable with the portfolio they’ve been sorted into and our Registered Investment Advisor can justify the recommendation to regulators.

From initial tests, we found that customers needed less information than we anticipated to make their decision. Conversely, our Registered Investment Advisor team required a deeper level of information to feel comfortable with a customer committing to their portfolio.

I worked closely with our content strategist to refine the flow of information and define semantic groups of content. This allowed us to keep information relevant to newer investors, a maximum of one click away. We heavily utilized progressive disclosure to ensure we provided enough information, without overwhelming new investors.

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Outcome

After many iterations, we landed on a layout that provides rich information for customers interested in going deep into the details of how the Robo Advisor works. For people who aren’t interested in every detail, the information we provide upfront should help them make a decision.

One might assume all of the content shown is required by our regulators. Instead, this information is a combination of what customers told us they would need in the moment to make a decision and required information.
In consequential research, customers specifically appreciated the data visualization to represent their portfolio, as well as content around fees and the minimum. When compared to our competitors, most customers felt like our version of their portfolio proposal made them feel confident about their recommendation.