Trader Wallet
Timeline
2022
Role
UI Designer
Team
Pierce Balmer, Emily Abeltins, Jordan Putnam
Overview
Throughout my time at 26 Degrees Global Markets, I regularly distributed surveys to segments of the client base. The objective of these surveys was to measure client satisfaction better understand clients needs with the overall goal of improving our product and service. From these surveys, we found majority of traders would hold multiple accounts with different brokers. Traders provided many different reasons for holding multiple accounts including: 'price point', 'risk mitigation' and 'legacy benefits'. This research lead to the HMW question:
How might we best cater for clients with multiple broking accounts?
Challenge
26 Degrees found that many of of their traders also held accounts with competitor brokers. This lead to problems regarding margin calls across accounts, requiring fund transfer which could take days at a time to clear. Should these funds not clear in time, positions would frequently have to be sold by the broker.
Solution
The solution we proposed was a wallet application for broking accounts, facilitating easy Broker to Broker fund transfer, the ability to manage multiple accounts in a single place and the ability to link a card to broking account. Features such as these would greatly reduce the frequency of traders transferring to and from a bank account.
User Research
Research was conducted through surveys to clients and guerrilla interviews with internal stakeholders. Surveys allowed us to discover the problem space and Guerilla interviews with the sales team allowed us to expand on these pain points, as well as provide the internal context of why these problems exist.
What we found from our research was that Traders were regularly complaining about having to deposit and withdraw funds from various broking accounts. This was largely due to to a surplus of margin calls, where a certain amount of money is needed in a traders account to maintain their leveraged positions. Margin calls are inevitable when trading leveraged products. Meeting these margin calls could take days at a time, with funds first having to leave the broker, enter the clients bank account and then finally be transferred into the other respective broking account.
Whilst these were important and useful insights, there were constraints on the degree of User Research facilitated throughout this project. Given the nature of the business, a lot of the UX decisions were ‘expert design decisions’ made by the sales team using their in-depth knowledge of the client base. Given this team were in regular contact with clients, they had a good concept of their needs. However, in an ideal world I would have liked to conduct more sophisticated user research and testing myself.
Conceptual Design
Our broker wallet application attempted to mitigate the issues discovered through research:
By facilitating Broker to Broker transfer we could greatly reduce wait times incurred by involving the bank as a middle man.
Providing users with the ability to manage multiple accounts within a single application would allow for more streamlined visibility of balances and margin calls.
Linking a bank card to a broking account would greatly reduce the frequency of client bank transfers, given transferring out for small purchases would no longer be required.
Detailed Design
Initial wireframes
High-Fidelity designs
Evaluation
This project was incredibly interesting to work on as it truly felt like it had the potential to disrupt and innovate and industry which clings to traditional values and heritage software. Unfortunately, at the point of Prototype Design and User Testing, the project was indefinitely placed on hold. Had User Testing planned to take place, immediate next steps would have involved the discussion with key stakeholders regarding success criteria for testing session, the creation of scenarios and tasks to test and the recruitment of willing participants.
