A regulated wealth manager replaces seven internal tools with one product. Designed to be used daily by advisors, learned in hours by new joiners, and inspected confidently by the compliance team.
The firm had grown to eighty advisors across three cities and onboarded clients through a stack of spreadsheets, vendor portals, and email threads. Each handoff added a day to onboarding. Compliance had flagged data living in three systems with no clear lineage. The cost of fragmentation was no longer hypothetical.
Leadership had a clear conviction. Invest in one product, not seven integrations. They wanted a partner who could think through the regulated edges of the work, not a vendor who could only draw screens. Six firms pitched. We won the engagement on the strength of a two-page memo, not a sixty-page deck.
We separated the work into four phases, each with its own definition of done. The team was small by design — one lead, one researcher, two product designers, with engineering oversight from a senior partner. The same four people stayed on the project from kick-off through launch.
We sat with advisors in Mumbai, Pune, and Bengaluru. We rode along on three client meetings. We mapped the firm's actual onboarding sequence — not the one in the SOP, the one that happens in practice. The brief we wrote afterward replaced four earlier internal documents.
The platform needed to behave like one tool to advisors, and like seven systems to compliance. We modeled the data flows, drew the role-based access matrix, and chose a stack that could be audited end to end. We worked closely with the firm's compliance lead — not around her.
Three core surfaces: a client onboarding flow, a portfolio review workspace, and an internal knowledge hub for advisors to search firm playbooks. Designed in two-week sprints. Built in parallel by the firm's engineering team, with our pod embedded for design reviews and architectural decisions.
Released to a pilot group of twelve advisors first. Weekly research calls for the first month. Adjustments to the onboarding sequence, workspace defaults, and search experience all came out of those sessions. Now in use across the firm's full advisory team, with a quarterly review cadence we still run.
The platform has replaced seven internal tools. New advisor onboarding has moved from days to hours. The compliance team has stopped flagging data lineage issues. Most importantly, advisors choose to open the platform — it is not mandated by the firm. That is the outcome we cared about most.
They did in eleven weeks what our previous vendor could not do in a year. Harder questions, fewer slides, and a product we actually use.