Northern Trust set out to reimagine the digital banking experience for its ultra-high-net-worth clients. While accustomed to highly personalized relationships, their clients were frustrated by the limited transparency and control they had over their assets on mobile.

To move from high level concept to tangible design directives, we conducted three rapid rounds of research. This allowed us to continuously update our stimuli to hone in feedback quickly.

To move from a high-level concept to tangible design direction, we conducted three rapid rounds of research with UHNW clients and their financial teams. Each round, allowed us to iteratively update our sacrificial stimuli, testing and refining ideas in real time to quickly hone in on what mattered most.

Our core research insights challenged the initial hypothesis for the app as a detailed, self-serve reporting tool. Instead, we learned their clients needed a simple view into their finances, based on groupings that make sense to them.

Instead, we learned their clients needed a simple, intuitive way to organize their financial world—flexibly grouping accounts based on what was meaningful to them, whether that was relationships, accounts, asset classes, or liquidity.

"I need to be able to meaningfully group assets into how I see my financial world, not how the bank sees it."

—Family Member

This reframe helped us prioritize a focused set of core features and translate insights into clear design directives, brought to life through an annotated vision prototype and illustrative user scenario. To ensure the vision was actionable, we also delivered an activation blueprint that grounded the work in concrete next steps.