City National Rochdale

Designing an elegant wealth manager experience.

Live link to project: cnr.com
Roles: Research, Visual, Strategy, Front-End｜Read time: 4 mins

The brief

The wealth management company City National Rochdale, who manages over $37 billion in assets for mostly high net worth investors, approached us with one simple task: “bring our experience into the modern world.”

The approach

Here’s just a snippet of what we had to reimagine:

It’s obvious that there was work to be done, but a redesign is more than just some UI improvements, especially when you are handling billions of dollars. Looking beyond the obvious redesign, there was a more important question:

“How might we make the user feel safe and trusted, when it came to choosing us as their reliable financial partner?”

The research

To try to break down the “how might we” question, we delved into the discovery phase which included:

1. A current state analysis on the existing CNR platform
2. Competitive insights
   
3. Stakeholder and advisor interviews.
   

From our research on the competitive market and advisor’s insights the trends began to surface as to what success looks like in the wealth management industry:

1. The main focus was on thought leadership. People wanted to know that the people handling their money were experts when forecasting potential market moving news. These insights were also showcased as quick “bite sized” snippets of information that users could easily digest.
2. Key statistics were presented in a more visually engaging manner: interactive formats to help simplify complex information.
   
3. Clear and concise CTA’s were used that contextually appeared at specific touch-points within the experience to engage the user.
   
4. A shift was seen towards a more traditional glossy publication site as opposed to a wealth manager site, where though leadership thrives over other portions of the experience.
   
5. A more refined tone and messaging that is less formal and more accessible/friendly were what the majority of wealth management companies were using.
   

The measures of success

After our discovery phase we were able to come up with some key metrics to what success looks like in this engagement, and those were:

1. Clearly communicate what we do and the true value of our partnership to advisors and their clients.
2. Show users the content they want in the format they want and have that process be seamless.
   
3. Create a destination that houses CNR’s strong thought leadership and latest thinking so advisors come here before calling up CNR’s portfolio managers.
   
4. Create a sales funnel through the site that captures rich data and qualifies more leads.
   
5. Build a site that can scale both on the front-end content and back-end maintenance as the business becomes more digital.
   

The concepts based on the research

We boiled down our research to two personas which we then based our two design directions.

In concept 1, the focus was highlighting the thought leadership. The vast majority of CNR’s clients were comprised of “client advisors,” would come to CNR to obtain a grasp on market movers and relay that information back to their customers. For this persona, they would arrive expecting to see the most popular content for the week, as well as the latest insights.
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In concept 2, the focus was on telling users a narrative about the value of CNR and what it meant to partner with them. For this persona, they needed help managing client needs and trust was a major key factor into finding their investment partner.  We moved forward with concept 2 and began refining the design.

The final design

We kept the design elegant from the use of typography by using serifs on all the headings and san serifs for easier reading, to a purposeful mix of dark and light colors. The dark elements would highlight the benefits of the partnership while the lighter elements would showcase the thought leadership.

A note on prototyping

We used Invision to prototype, but because the client had difficulty grasping how certain key functions such as how the navigation and drop down menu worked and how elements shifted when dealing with responsiveness, we needed something more robust. I put together this HTML/CSS landing page prototype using Webflow within a few hours to help clear up the confusion.
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Link to the landing page prototype here.

Reception

The redesign caught the attention of the mother company, Royal Bank of Canada, who reached out to get in talks with redesigning the banking site City National Bank. This in part made the CEO of CNR very happy.

There was a page dedicated to quickly getting the content advisors wanted. Talking points, which were the summary portion in the articles, helped clients relay important information back to their customers. Revamped economic indicators, "Speedometers," something both the client and advisors were hesitant in changing since it was system they had used for almost a decade, was simplified to be able to showcase the economic overview at a glance with 3 major indicators, accompanied with a summary, and then rest of the indicators immediately underneath. Language that everyone could understand such as "neutral to positive" vs "tight to easy" and other financial terms, were used to reduce confusion.