Collaborative account opening

Designing a clearer onboarding experience for both domestic financial clients and financial advisors while onboarding investment accounts.

Company: Morgan Stanley '

Role: UX Designer

Timeline: 3 months

Team: Product manager, engineers, compliance stakeholders

Responsibilities: User research, journey mapping, interaction design, high-fidelity prototyping

The problem

Opening an investment account required clients to complete a series of regulatory and financial documents through a manual onboarding process. Advisors reported that clients often struggled to complete the process and documents independently.

Common issues included:

  • Confusion around legal and financial terminology

  • Clients abandoning the process when forms became too complex

  • Advisors needing to manually guide clients through the workflow

These challenges slowed account creation and created additional overhead for advisors.

The goal

Design a collaborative onboarding experience that helps clients move through the account opening process more confidently and efficiently.

The design needed to:

  • Improve clarity around financial documentation

  • Reduce friction during longer forms

  • Allow clients to complete onboarding at their own pace

  • Decrease reliance on advisor assistance

Research

To better understand the existing onboarding process, I conducted two qualitative research sessions with financial advisors who regularly helped clients open accounts.

Research Questions:

  • Roles and responsibilities?

  • Where do clients get stuck in the onboarding process?

  • Which steps require the most advisor assistance?

  • What causes clients to abandon the flow?

Key Insights

  • Legal agreements and financial language appeared early in the flow, which created confusion before users understood the overall process.

  • Advisors frequently needed to explain terminology

  • Long flows caused abandonment

  • When users encountered complex questions or missing information, they frequently exited the process rather than continuing.

Design strategy

  • Guide users through complexity

    • provide contextual help for financial terminology

  • Reduce cognitive load

    • Reorder onboarding steps to build momentum in completing process

  • Allow flexible completion

    • Users can save progress and return later

Improvements

  • Addition of tooltips, descriptive text, steppers

    • Adding tooltips, descriptive text, and steppers made it easier for users to understand financial terminology such as PEP related questions and total net worth and better understand the flow. this also allowed for reduced incorrect answers given which helped Financial advisors fill out account details later in flow.

  • Reordered onboarding flow

    • Research showed clients often abandon flow after not understanding complex questions. Reordering the onboarding flow made it to where more complex question where asked later in the flow and move required information to the front giving the user the ability to quickly skim through the optional information and giving a better chance at completing flow.

  • Save progress

    • Save progress let clients fill out the questionnaire at their own pace giving them comfortability to come back at a desired time.

Design artifacts

Throughout the project I created several artifacts to guide the design and development process:

  • User journey maps of the onboarding experience

  • Flow diagrams mapping the account creation process

  • Interaction designs for key onboarding steps

  • High-fidelity prototypes used for engineering handoff

These prototypes were shared with product and engineering teams to support implementation.

Outcome

The redesigned onboarding experience helped create a clearer and more supportive account creation process.

Key improvements included:

  • Improved clarity around Onboarding process

  • Reduced friction during complex steps

  • Greater flexibility for users completing longer forms

The final designs were delivered to engineering through high-fidelity prototypes and interaction specifications.

Edge Cases Considered

Collaborative onboarding introduces several edge scenarios.

The design accounted for situations such as:

  • Collaborators not accepting invitations

  • People that are retired/students will have a different flow

  • Address not being permanent can cause issues

  • Clients sumbitting wrong information to FA’s

Handling these scenarios prevented applications from becoming stuck in invalid states.

Reflection

  • This project highlighted the importance of designing for clarity in complex financial workflows.

  • Through research with advisors, I learned that many onboarding challenges stemmed not from the technology itself, but from the cognitive load created by financial and regulatory information.

  • By restructuring the flow and introducing contextual guidance, the design helped make the onboarding experience more approachable for new clients.

Confidentially note

Due to confidentially agreements with Morgan Stanley Product visuals have been removed or simplified.

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