The Challenge
Financial advisors experienced a 73% abandonment rate during identity verification, creating significant friction in the onboarding journey and limiting acquisition and activation.
The onboarding process took 7–10 days, compared to competitors who completed similar workflows in approximately 48 hours, creating a major competitive disadvantage.
In addition, the experience was constrained by:
- Strict legal and compliance requirements
- Fragmented, non-standardized workflows across systems
- Limited consistency in verification steps and user guidance
- Lack of a unified, system-level onboarding experience
These challenges made the experience difficult to complete, difficult to scale, and difficult to optimize.
My Strategic Role
As Principal Product Designer, I led the end-to-end redesign of the identity verification experience—operating across product strategy, design execution, and cross-functional alignment.
I partnered closely with Legal, Compliance, Engineering, Product, and Business stakeholders to:
- Define success metrics aligned to conversion, speed, and compliance outcomes
- Establish decision-making frameworks to navigate trade-offs between risk, usability, and technical constraints
- Introduce collaboration models that reduced cross-functional friction and accelerated delivery
Beyond the product, I helped evolve how teams worked—ensuring design decisions were grounded in both user needs and measurable business impact.
The Impact
The redesigned verification experience delivered measurable improvements in conversion, speed, and scalability:
- 67% reduction in completion time, accelerating onboarding
- Conversion increased to 94%, reducing drop-off at a critical funnel stage
- Enabled onboarding at scale, supporting thousands of advisor activations within a single quarter
These improvements contributed to multi-million dollar growth in assets under management (AUM) and reduced operational overhead.
The design patterns and workflows established in this initiative have since scaled across adjacent verification efforts, influencing multiple high-impact platform investments.
Full project: discovery workshops → journey mapping → wireframes → hi-fi design → design system governance
1. Problem Context (Business + Design)
User Persona: Financial Advisor (RIA/Wealth Manager)
2. Research
Discovery Workshop (Sticky note)
Two-day discovery workshop with product, compliance, sales, and UX teams — mapping the full advisor journey across four stages: Awareness, Consideration, Acquisition, and Service/Loyalty. Post-its are color-coded by type: pink = user needs, yellow = business requirements, green = solution ideas. Output: 60+ ideas surfaced across all teams.
Prioritization Workshop
Cross-functional prioritization session — each team member dot-voted on the ideas surfaced in the discovery workshop. Four journey phases are visible across the whiteboard: Awareness, Consideration, Acquisition, and Service/Loyalty. Different colored dots represent different team perspectives: UX, product, sales, and compliance. Output: 60+ ideas narrowed to 12 priority focus areas that became the design brief.
Full Journey Map
A comprehensive journey map developed to anchor all design decisions — titled “A Journey to Financial Freedom: Driving Sought vs Sold.” The map spans three advisor mindsets across the horizontal axis:
- Life Happens to Me — Advisors who respond reactively to client requests. Design implication: streamlined registration with minimum required steps and clear progress visibility.
- Make Life Happen — Advisors who proactively grow their practice. Design implication: rich product catalog, comparison tools, and advisor-specific resources above the fold.
- I Live My Life — Advisors deeply engaged in financial planning and client relationships. Design implication: advanced tools, portfolio integration, and deep data access.
This mindset framework shaped every navigation, content, and flow decision in the redesign.
3. Design Process
User Flow & Pain Points
The critical user flow mapped before redesign — showing the path from Home Page through Product Discovery, Lead generation, RIA Registration, and final Decision. Two key gaps were identified and annotated in red: (1) No product comparison tool existed — advisors could not evaluate annuity options side by side before committing to registration. (2) No trust signals or plain-language guidance existed at the registration step — the highest drop-off point in the entire flow. Both gaps were addressed in the redesign.
Sketch → Wireframe → Mid-fi Progression
Three rounds of design iteration — from rapid hand sketches through lo-fidelity wireframes to mid-fidelity layouts.
Stage 1 — Hand sketches (left): Rapid ideation of navigation structure, page hierarchy, and module layout. Key decisions made: dual navigation for consumer vs advisor audiences, resource library positioning, registration entry points.
Stage 2 — Lo-fidelity wireframes (center): Structure and content hierarchy validated with the product team. Key decisions made: above-fold content priority, form field grouping, progress stepper placement.
Stage 3 — Mid-fidelity wireframes (right): Content and layout validated with stakeholders before moving to high fidelity. Includes Featured Solutions, Advisor testimonials, registration form, and footer structure.
A/B Test Results
Cross-Functional Collaboration Map
4. Final Solution
Wealth Managers Final UI
Final high-fidelity design for the Org’s Financial Wealth Managers landing page — the primary entry point for RIAs and independent advisors discovering Org’s product and registration process.
Five key design decisions visible in this screen:
- Dual-mode navigation — Public navigation serves consumer audiences; an authenticated state serves registered advisors. Separating these entry points reduced cognitive load and eliminated the confusion of a single mixed-audience navigation.
- Trust-forward headline — “Investment advisor registration made easy” appears before the registration CTA. Research showed advisors needed confidence in the process before they would commit to starting it.
- Advisor-centric framing — “Strategies designed with your business model in mind” leads the content, not product specifications. Research showed advisors want practice-building solutions, not annuity product descriptions.
- Resources above the fold — Business strategy tools, client education material, and research and insights are visible before scrolling. Mapped directly to the three advisor mindset groups identified in the journey mapping workshop.
- Consultant form placement — The “Connect with a consultant” form appears on the landing page, not hidden in a contact page. Research showed advisors wanted a human contact option available at every stage of the journey, not just at the end.
RIA Registration Final UI
Final high-fidelity design for the RIA Registration flow — the highest drop-off point in the original experience and the primary focus of the redesign.
Five key design decisions in this screen:
- “I want to” radio selection — Two clear registration paths: Sign up to access Org’s annuities, or execute a Full RIA agreement. Research revealed advisors had different regulatory starting points and a single registration flow caused confusion and abandonment.
- Plain-language heading — “Register with Org’s” replaced the original legal heading “RIA Agreement Execution.” A direct change from a usability testing insight: advisors said the original heading felt like they were signing a legal contract before understanding what they were getting.
- Benefits of registering visible before form fields — Three registration benefits appear before any personal information is requested. Research finding: advisors asked “why should I give you this information?” before they trusted the form. Answering that question before asking reduced friction significantly.
- Advisor CRD auto-fill — Entering a CRD number automatically populates firm name, SEC CRD, and mailing address from the FINRA database. An engineering integration that eliminated three manual form fields — one of the highest sources of error and abandonment in the original flow.
- FINRA BrokerCheck badge — The BrokerCheck verification badge appears at the point where sensitive personal information is requested. A/B testing showed this single trust signal improved registration completion by 12 percentage points — more impact than any structural change to the form itself.
5. Design System
The Org’s Financial design system — built to ensure consistency across three product lines and governed across two engineering teams.
Four layers of the system visible in this documentation:
- Typography scale — Superior Title Bold (headlines, H1–H3) and Copperwa Medium (body, labels) with defined size, weight, and line-height values for both public and authenticated states.
- Color system — Org’s Maroon (
#8B1A1A) as primary, with a full secondary palette covering status colors, background zones, and text hierarchy. Public and authenticated region colors documented separately. - Component library — 45+ components documented including input fields (with all validation states), checkboxes, navigation (public and authenticated modes), spotlight component, promo card component, journey bar, and RIA comparison highlight.
- Governance model — New components required design and engineering review before addition. Components were versioned by sprint. Monthly design system office hours held with engineering to align on token updates and component adoption.
Result:
Design-to-development handoff time reduced by 35% across product teams. The system was adopted as the standard for all Org’s digital properties.
6. Outcomes & Impact
What changed — 90 days after launch
Why this matters for consumer platforms at scale
The design problems I solved at Org’s Financial are not unique to financial services. They are foundational to any product where users must verify their identity, complete a multi-step enrollment, and make a high-stakes decision — which describes nearly every consumer platform at scale.
What I designed at Product Financial → What consumer platforms solve
- RIA identity verification and multi-step registration → Subscriber sign-up, identity verification, and account activation flows
- Multi-step enrollment with progressive disclosure → Subscription and account creation across devices
- Trust signals at every sensitive data input → Trust at checkout, payment entry, and account management
- Product selection across annuity product lines → Product bundle, subscription tier, and upgrade selection
- Design system governance across 3 product lines → Experience consistency across multiple consumer products and platforms
Financial services holds the highest bar for identity trust, compliance, and data sensitivity of any industry. If you can make an RIA registration feel effortless — under regulatory scrutiny, with sensitive personal data, across a fragmented multi-product ecosystem — you can design for any consumer platform at scale.
Retrospective & Lessons
Shift Left on Compliance: Bringing Legal into the discovery phase (not just review) transformed them from “blockers” into strategic partners.
Logic over Pixels: Solving for complex “edge cases” (expired IDs, mismatches) drove the 90% support ticket reduction more than any UI change.
Unified Metrics: Aligning Design and Engineering around a real-time conversion dashboard eliminated opinion-based friction and sped up decision-making.
Next: Financial Product Enrollment & Selection Flows
How I redesigned the account setup, funding, and product selection experience for financial advisors and retail investors — and why those transactional flows connect directly to Disney’s commerce and subscription design challenges.
View next project →
Want to discuss this work? ganjipally@gmail.com · LinkedIn
