The redesign of a legacy financial adviser tool

What is this platform?

SOL, or Singlife Online, is a platform for Singlife Financial Advisers to manage their clients’ policies. On the platform, they can retrieve client personal information, generate policy documents such as benefit illustrations, access the latest surrender values and investment funds, and update client policies, including personal information and payment methods.

SOL has a monthly active user base of approximately 4000 individuals, comprising both Independent and Singlife Financial Advisers.

Problems faced by financial advisers and business

Unmet adviser needs

Our advisers face significant frustrations and restrictions while trying to find essential information or carry out time-sensitive actions related to client policies. These challenges stem from platform limitations and can leave important goals and needs unmet.

Inhibiting productivity

The platform's information and visual structure are severely lacking, with crucial content buried deep within and disorganized placement. Even straightforward tasks demand needlessly intricate interactions to be accomplished.

The platform is also riddled with highly consequential bugs. This has affected our advisers’ productivity to the point that, more often than we care to admit, the platform fails when they are physically with a client.

Higher Business Expenses

The lack of information available on the platform results in advisers calling customer support to retrieve it, creating significant annual costs.

Design x business goals

Business goals

The business wants a redesign of the platform with improved UX and product offerings. Some of the key KPIs:

• Address the problems, needs and objectives of Financial Advisers.
• Reduce the need to call the customer support centre, thereby reducing costs.
• Improve workflows and processes through digitisation and automation.

Design goals

We strive to enhance the overall experience by tackling 4 key areas: Features, Design, Flow, Content.

• Product Features must first and foremost address ALL Financial Adviser goals and needs, so they can accomplish all their daily tasks and responsibilities within this platform.
• Design a modern and aesthetically pleasing interface while adhering to our design system and language.
• Seamless Flow with simplified, automated processes, quick access to vital information, and context-based helpful prompts.
• Content like information or visuals organized with structured layouts and hierarchies, providing a consistent rhythm, predictability, and ease of scanning.

Who says financial platforms have to be boring? Financial Advisers are people too and the tools they use could honestly do with much more love. Our mission is to build an exceptional and visually appealing platform that's also delightful to use.

Design strategy

Discovery & analysis

Understanding where we're at first is key. To begin, I delved deeply into the assessment of our existing platform and also examined some of our competitors, with a specific focus on usability, key features, design, and other relevant aspects.

I then created and executed a research plan, using the following methods to learn the following:

• User Interviews to unearth insights into the pain points, procedures, mental frameworks, goals and motivations of Financial Advisers.
• Usability Testing to assess the effectiveness and pertinence of our design and concept.

Concept shaping

At the same time, we quickly developed design concepts directly from our deep understanding of Financial Advisers' needs and preferences. We took this chance to challenge existing design norms, pushing the boundaries of UI visual design to ensure our solutions would scale and stay relevant for years to come.

Influencing up, down and across

We gathered extensive data from 14 Financial Advisers and synthesized it using affinity mapping. From this, we developed personas and customer journey maps that we shared with relevant working groups and management. This directly informed and significantly contributed to management discussions and feature prioritization.

The outcomes we achieved

Overall interaction costs on the platform reduced by at least 30%.

Compared with the legacy platform, the number of fields, pages, and interactions has been significantly reduced and streamlined. Advisers can now complete their goals and tasks much faster with fewer interactions.

Support-centre call enquiries reduced significantly.

Independent and Singlife Financial Advisers can now access and retain all information about Singlife customers, removing the need to call customer service support thus reducing cost.

Straight-through processing with instant results.

This means that Advisers no longer need to email to initiate policy-management services, resulting in significantly faster processing times and turnaround for Advisers.

Improved efficiency and satisfaction.

Satisfaction increased significantly, based on regular direct-feedback sessions, surveys, and SUS scores.