CONTEXT
Redesigning Client Onboarding at RBC Wealth Management
At RBC Wealth Management, client onboarding is at the heart of operations. It's how Advisors and Associates create profiles, open accounts, and ensure KYC compliance. Yet, the onboarding process was slowing users down. Fragmented systems, manual workarounds, and unclear steps made it time-consuming and error prone, affecting both efficiency and the client experience.
We transformed a complex, time-consuming onboarding process into a clear and intuitive experience, making it easier for Advisors to set up client profiles, open investment accounts, and manage KYC information seamlessly.
The outcome: a streamlined tool that saved over 354 hours in just six months and significantly reduced errors and manual rework.
MY ROLE
OUTCOMES
354
hours saved for Advisors and Associates (over 6 months).
74
hours saved for Branch Operations.
Sharp decrease in documentation errors and manual rework.
CHALLENGES
Complex Regulatory Environment: Wealth management onboarding is bound by strict compliance, legacy processes, and deeply ingrained user habits.
Advocating for Design: The product and tech teams were initially delivery-driven, with minimal focus on user-centered design.
Changing User Behavior: Advisors and Associates were used to workarounds built into the old system, making adoption of the new experience a critical success factor.
APPROACH
I took a collaborative, research-driven approach, leveraging user interviews, co-creation workshops, ongoing validation, and design thinking practices to tight alignment with business stakeholders and to redesign the client onboarding journey.
The result: a streamlined, guided experience that reduces friction, minimizes errors, and builds user confidence at every step.
Key highlights include:
01 Streamlined onboarding and maintenance Journey
The original onboarding experience at RBC Wealth Management was fragmented, inefficient, and overwhelming, especially for Advisors, Associates, and Branch Managers. Key tasks like opening accounts or reviewing approvals were buried in complex navigation, with no clear entry point or contextual guidance.
To redesign the client onboarding experience into a personalized, intuitive hub that empowers users to confidently navigate and complete onboarding workflows, reducing errors, minimizing rework, and improving overall task efficiency across roles, increasing COB adoption.
I led in-depth interviews with 20+ RBC Advisors, Associates, and Branch Directors, along with 7 internal SMEs, to uncover key user needs, motivations, and pain points. We synthesized these insights into themes and prioritized them by user impact and feasibility.
Key findings from the initial research:
- The experience lacked role-based personalization and proactive validation, causing users to create incomplete profiles or run into compliance issues late in the process.
- Irrelevant or outdated fields added further confusion
- Vague error messages and poor feedback loops led to delays, rework, and frustration, particularly for new or infrequent users.
- Users couldn’t complete relationship-related tasks without duplicating steps across accounts and clients.
- Lack of support advanced functionality for managing and analyzing relationships, helping users work more efficiently and effectively.
Below, I’ll highlight key improvements from the redesign, including the new Private Corporate journey.
We reimagined the homepage as a central hub that guides users confidently through their workflows and that includes:
Quick Access to Key Actions: Users can easily open multiple accounts, search for clients, and initiate onboarding journeys directly from the homepage, reducing friction and speeding up core tasks.
Quick Actions for opening new accounts or searching existing clients, making core tasks fast and accessible.
Progressive Updates: As the platform evolves, users get real-time updates in a consistent space, so they’re never caught off guard by new features or changes.
Proactive Approvals & Reminders: Clear visibility into pending tasks helps users stay compliant and avoid delays.
Smart Validation: The system checks for existing client profiles early in the journey to avoid redundant or incomplete records.
A progress tracker offered real-time visibility into each stage of the process.
A completion tracker ensured compliance by confirming all required fields were filled before submission.
Dynamic field validation helped catch missing or incorrect information early.
One-click download enabled quick access to all mandatory documentation tailored to each account type.
Provides Advisor Teams with the ability to customize the welcome page clients see when completing their eSignature package sent
from COB.
Challenges
Enable users to complete relationship-related tasks without duplicating steps across accounts and clients.
Support advanced functionality for managing and analyzing relationships, helping users work more efficiently and effectively.
Streamline the journey for creating accounts and client profiles by reducing unnecessary fields, Clarifying confusing sections, enhancing the overall COB experience
Goal
Provide users with a centralized hub for Associates and Advisors to view and manage all client and account relationships in one place reducing the risk of overlooking relationships as well as improve user satisfaction and reduce errors.
We used a continuous discovery approach to uncover deeper user needs, motivations, and pain points. Through weekly touchpoints, we engaged with over 14 Advisors and Associates throughout the design process, ensuring their feedback guided each stage of development.
We began by mapping the core user flows for relationship management in COB, ensuring alignment with business stakeholders from the start. This helped set clear expectations and provided a strong foundation for design and research.
Complete relationship tasks in one place, no need to repeat steps for accounts and clients.
Fewer fields, clearer steps, and a smoother experience when creating accounts and profiles.
Quick Relationship Edits:
Easily adjust relationships directly at the account level.
Interactive Org Chart: Visualize relationships and quickly connect with key contacts for better management.
To validate our design for managing Non-individual client types, we conducted six 60-minute semi-structured interviews, four with DS Associates and two with PH&N Associates.
Our goals were to assess whether the new design could be used without prior training, identify any areas of confusion, and uncover potential training opportunities. We also aimed to understand how users felt about the updated approach to managing relationships. This user feedback played a critical role in refining our design and improving usability across key workflows.
Users found the system intuitive and appreciated having multiple ways to manage relationships across tabs.
What Worked
Clear and easy to use
Flexible ways to add and view relationships
Quick Wins
Add confirmation messages for completed actions
Clarify relationship types and improve screen hierarchy
Guide users to next steps like generating documentation
Opportunities
Simplify the editing flow
Make contact info easier to find
These insights helped us refine the experience and improve clarity across key tasks.
IMPACT
The new COB platform has redefined how RBC Wealth Management onboards clients, boosting operational efficiency, reinforcing compliance, and strengthening client trust.
Initial adoption reached 73%, and after implementing key enhancements and new journey flows, adoption rose to 93%.
Most importantly, the project helped foster a culture shift within the organization, embedding a more design-led approach to solving business challenges.
Let’s work together