Untangling Complexity in Enterprise Wealth Management

Replacing Systemic Friction with Clarity for RBC Advisors
Investment Policy Statements (IPS) are critical, legally mandated documents. Yet, the system designed to manage them had become a primary source of friction, costing advisors hours each week in manual workarounds and increasing compliance risk due to error prone processes.

Advisors faced a "status soup" of overlapping labels, could not view critical details like expiry dates, and were forced into arduous workarounds for simple tasks like renewing a document. This wasn't an inconvenience, it was a systematic failure affecting advisors across Canada, undermining their efficiency and the client experience.

My Role: Lead Product Designer, researcher and strategist for the IPS experience overhaul.

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Objective: Deliver immediate quick wins through a streamlined dashboard while defining a north star vision for a fully integrated IPS workflow.
A rainbow of frustration: Each color represents a different advisor from across Canada. Clusters show these weren't isolated incidents, but systematic failures affecting everyone.

Uncovering Systemic Failure: A "Rainbow of Frustration"

To move beyond anecdotes and prove the problem was universal, I led a cross Canada discovery phase, synthesizing feedback from 15 advisors across five regions through in-depth interviews and contextual observation.

The Affinity Map: Proof of Pattern

The resulting map was undeniable. Each color represented a different advisor, yet their frustrations clustered identically around core themes:

This wasn't a case of a few dissatisfied users, the "rainbow of frustration" provided tangible evidence of identical, systemic failures impacting advisors everywhere.

Impact Quantification

While qualitative insights dominated, early estimates from advisory teams indicated:

These figures reinforced the urgency of redesigning the experience not just for usability, but for operational and compliance integrity.

The Journey Map: Pinpointing the Breaking Points

Mapping the end-to-end advisor journey exposed the exact moments where the system created maximum friction and operational drag:

These artifacts moved the conversation from "users are frustrated" to "we have validated, systemic failures at these specific journey points," providing the clear, actionable foundation for my design strategy.

From Status Soup to Actionable Clarity: A Visual Transformation

Pain: The core of the problem was immediately visible in the UI itself. The "before" state was a masterclass in cognitive overload: cryptic statuses, missing critical data, and no clear path to action.

My redesign focused on architecting clarity and empowering advisors with information and tools.

What I designed (and shipped):

  • Simplified status list: Collapsed redundant statuses into clear buckets like Waiting for Approval or Waiting for Signature.
  • Expanded IPS details: Document ID, signature type, and AO package links surfaced directly in the dashboard.
  • Expiry dates and household names: Advisors could now see expiry at a glance and view portfolios by household.
  • Filters: Added filters by IPS type and status to cut through noise.

Impact:

The dashboard became cleaner and faster to use. Advisors no longer wasted time hunting through “status soup.”

Before dashboard

After dashboard

Simplified status list. Removed and combined similar statuses together for more cohesiveness.  

1. Introduce new status (Approved by RMG) so that there is a differentiation of when an IPS has been approved by RMG, and when an IPS has been sent for signing.

2. Signing order of IC and Client to be combined into a single step as documents are sent to both IA/IC and Clients at the same time.

Shipping Momentum: Securing Quick Wins to Build Trust

The pain: Beyond the dashboard overhaul, I identified and championed a series of targeted, high impact fixes.

These initiatives were crucial for building immediate credibility with users and demonstrating a commitment to addressing their day to day frustrations.

Strategy: Isolate and Execute on "Quick Wins"

I prioritized features that delivered disproportionate relief relative to their development effort. This strategy built product momentum and generated user goodwill that was essential for the larger platform transformation.

Shipped: Batch Delete Functionality

  • The Problem: Advisors wasted significant time deleting IPS drafts one by one a frequent but tedious task.
  • The Solution: Shipped a multi-select, batch delete feature with a clear confirmation modal and success toast.
  • The Impact: This instantly eliminated a daily frustration, saving advisors collective hours of manual effort and proving our team's ability to deliver tangible value quickly.

(L) Allow deletion of additional IPS status types. IPSs that cannot be deleted: Completed, Waiting for (any) signature, Migrated

(R) Enable batch delete

Validated & Prioritized: Streamlined Search & Custom Alerts

  • The Insight: Usability testing revealed an unused dropdown search, adding UI complexity without value. I advocated for its removal to simplify the interface.

  • The Strategic Pivot: I also identified and documented a strong user need for customizable email notifications, a feature that would allow teams to manage workflows more effectively. This was socialized with product leadership and added to the backlog as a high priority follow up.

Why This Matters: This approach demonstrates a critical senior skill: product triage. It shows you can balance long term vision with the tactical execution of features that deliver immediate relief and build trust, all while collecting evidence for the next set of strategic priorities.

(L) Customize IC signature notifications CTA; (R) display modal with custom settings

Architecting for Flexibility: Solving Foundational Flaws

The most significant advisor frustrations were not UI issues but baked into the product's core architecture. The system’s rigidity tying document finalization directly to sending and offering no path for renewal forced advisors into inefficient and risky workarounds.

My role was to diagnose these foundational flaws and design a more flexible and powerful system model.

Redesigning the Core Document Model

I spearheaded the design for a new, more flexible IPS architecture that decoupled key actions to grant advisors necessary control.

The "Renew" Function:

  • The Problem: An expired IPS required a complete, manual recreation from scratch, a massive waste of time on a document that was 99% identical.
  • The Solution: A ‘Renew’ action that reactivates an expired IPS, resetting its status to Finalized not yet sent and preserving all its content.
  • The Impact: This eliminates a huge source of manual, error-prone rework, turning a multi step, frustrating task into a single click.

Instead of rebuilding, advisors could simply ‘renew’ an expired IPS.

Decoupling Finalization from Sending:

  • The Problem: The irreversible act of "finalizing" a document also immediately sent it to the client, creating anxiety and preventing advisors from preparing documents in advance.
  • The Solution: I decoupled these actions. Advisors can now Finalize a document (locking its content and making it ready for sending) without triggering any client communication. Sending became a separate, explicit action.
  • The Impact: This reduces cognitive load and error risk by creating a clear, two-step process. It gives advisors control over their workflow, allowing them to prepare documents on their own schedule.

Prep documents without accidentally triggering client emails; Finalize and Send split into distinct steps for clarity.

Strategic Impact & Future Vision

These designs address the highest-leverage pain points in the IPS lifecycle.

While engineered as future state improvements, they represent a necessary evolution of the product's core architecture toward a more flexible, advisor centric model.

They are designed, validated, and ready to unlock significant efficiency gains upon implementation.

Defining the North Star: Scaling Efficiency and Expertise

Solving today's pain points was only the first step. To create lasting, compounding value, I defined a north star vision focused on scaling advisor efficiency and democratizing expertise through smarter, more reusable systems.

The Pillars of the Future State Vision

I explored and designed for key strategic pillars that address deeper workflow inefficiencies and onboarding challenges.

IPS Templates: Institutionalizing Knowledge

  • The Vision: Move from one off document creation to a knowledge reuse model. Senior advisors can create, duplicate, and apply standardized templates for common portfolio types.
  • The Impact: This saves hours of repetitive setup, ensures consistency and compliance, and allows best practices to be shared across teams.

Reusable IPS templates to save hours of repetitive setup.

Refined flow shaped by dev constraints and advisor input.

Search redesigned with pagination and multiple contact fields.

Cleaner flows for linking accounts and assigning roles.

Architecting Resilient Foundations

  • The Vision: Design flows that are inherently robust. This included pagination for large datasets, refined search, and cleaner account linking to handle the complexity of large households gracefully.
  • The Impact: Creates a system that scales with advisor needs, preventing new friction points as usage grows.

Inline guidance to reduce blank page stress.

Inline Guidance & Best Practices

  • The Vision: Embed expertise directly into the product. Contextual tooltips and guidance within the IPS draft itself reduce the cognitive load and "blank page anxiety" for newer advisors.
  • The Impact: This accelerates onboarding, reduces errors, and helps maintain a high standard of advice without constant supervision.
Quick wins shipped, foundations set for the future

The pain: Beyond immediate frustrations, advisors and associates wanted better ways to reuse work and get guidance while drafting IPSs.

What shipped:

  • Batch delete
  • Simplified status list
  • Expanded IPS details view
  • Expiry date in dashboard columns
  • Household portfolio naming

What’s designed but waiting:

  • Email notification customization
  • Finalize without sending
  • Reactivate expired IPS
  • IPS templates and best practices guidance

Reflection: Enterprise design is rarely linear. Priorities shift, timelines slip, and many designs live in “exploratory” mode longer than expected.

But progress is layered:

  • Quick wins built trust and delivered immediate relief.
  • Explorations created alignment and led to new conversations.
  • Larger visions gave the team a backlog to pull from when capacity opened.

For me, the project reinforced that enterprise UX isn’t about perfect processes. It’s about removing friction step by step, while designing a path forward for when the timing is right.