product design
Financial Reporting
Designing ways financial institutions can automate their reporting needs. 
Role
Product Designer Design Engineer Product Manager
2020 - 2022
Goals
Increase efficiencies, design and propose enhancements for reporting product, while adhering to a client's branding guidelines.
Overview
Financial institutions are constantly creating reports regarding their investments, their strategies, in addition to marketing documents. Government regulated reports may require clear analytics, explicit disclosures, and specific formatting to meet compliance standards.
The amount of manual effort required to keep up with compliance and formatting standards from regulatory bodies presents a clear product opportunity in the financial markets.
The product, Publisher, answers the call to providing a solution where financial institutions can automate their specific reporting needs while integrating their proprietary data.
Impact
-
371
Unique Clients
Subscribe to the bespoke reporting solution which automates client-branded financial documents for individual institutional firms.
-
$30 M
Annual Subscription Value
This reporting product brings in upwards of $30 million in annual revenue from enterprise clients.
-
2K Hits / Day
Avg. Daily Usage per Account
Tracking the active usage of the product helps us identify whether or not our products are successful in gaining adoption - but more importantly indicates the value we’re able to create.
FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS can improve their time to market, for required reporting, if provided with an efficient workflow consolidating qualitative and quantitative data into one location.
How might we provide efficient mechanisms for our clients to generate critical reports on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis?
Opportunity
At FactSet, most institutional clients upload their proprietary data to the system. Clients then run their data through various analytics products. Publisher, specifically, enables clients to generate reports leveraging their proprietary data.
The opportunity to combine data with FactSet’s analytics paves a way for clients to automate their tedious processes and produce comprehensive, required documentation of their investments and strategies.
In addition to saving the clients hundreds of billable hours the product brings in upwards of $30 MM in revenue annually.
Insights
Through user research, we gathered and documented important feedback to inform our design decisions.
5 of 7 client participants experience pain points when needing to make edits to their reports:
3 of 5 participants would like to make formatting changes (add dates, add fields, change colors, etc.).
2 of 5 participants would like to update disclosures and add commentary.
Process
Working closely with the product manager, we mapped out user flows, user journeys, and task flows. We worked together to address specific product goals to build out a better, efficient product.
Focusing on key flows such as running a report, editing text, and client-added content structured how we were to approach the problems at hand.
Ideation
Design Decisions
Collaborating cross-functionally with engineering.
Rapid prototyping through design options.
Writing code to develop and ship bespoke documents.
Documenting product workflows and establish connections for engineering handoff.
Key Takeaways + Next Steps
Providing a way for the client to be a part of their reporting process facilitated more opportunities for clients to use publisher with more frequency. The feedback received was positive in that the clients did not have to rely on their account teams to make corrections for them.
Things that didn’t work so well are the number of clicks to get to the variable menu options. While it’s better to have the option, I’d like to work out ways we can edit text and make customizations even easier for the end user.
The next steps would also include running reports concurrently. The feedback we gathered from our research incorporated voices of senior portfolio managers who would benefit from any time-saving methods of running their reports.
