BTG Pactual · São Paulo · 2019—2021

An advisors platform for four business verticals

BTG Pactual’s investment advisors worked across several scattered tools. I designed one workspace for them, used in four business verticals: a dashboard each office configures, a side menu of the advisor's tools, and a client page that holds everything about one client. The directors of the four verticals could each veto the project. I led it from 12 interviews to a concept test with 90% acceptance, and to one first release (MVP) all four directors signed.

BTG Pactual’s advisors worked across scattered tools. I designed one workspace for four business verticals, tested it at 90% acceptance, and led it to a first release all four directors signed.

Role: Product Design Lead.
Team: Me plus 4 product designers, with tech leads and 4 business directors.
Context: The investment verticals at one of Latin America's largest investment banks.
Contribution: research · concept design · concept testing · workshop facilitation · prioritisation · team leadership

01 — The advisors platform

Three of the business directors asked for a new platform. Their advisors said the existing one was incomplete, with features scattered across separate tools, and that the scattering hurt their performance.

The work ran in two phases, described in section 04. I ran Phase 1, from research to an approved concept. Then I was promoted to Design Lead and built the team for Phase 2: four designers, each owning one module, while I kept designing.

Independent offices selling BTG products.

Advisors inside the bank, facing clients directly.

Advisors managing large fortunes, the bank's biggest specialty.

A separate network of advisors that came with a bank BTG Pactual acquired.

The modular dashboard, as an advisor sees it. Each client or task the advisor opens sits in a tab across the top, like browser tabs, and the advisor's tools sit in a rail on the left, so they can move between clients and tools on one screen.

Note · BTG Pactual

Two and a half years at BTG Pactual, in retail and investments. I shaped the early MVP of BTG+, the consumer app, now one of the group’s largest businesses. This project is on the investment side.

The same years at BTG Pactual, on the retail side, are the context for Modular card insurance.

02 — The problem

Advisors were pulling their information together by hand, work the software should have done. The interviews below show how, in three of the four verticals.

I interviewed 12 advisors from the B2B, B2C and Advisors verticals. Wealth was left out of the first concept, to keep the concept small enough to deliver.

We expected advisors' information to be scattered, and the interviews confirmed it. What an advisor needed for each decision was split across five separate tools: Portal Admin, Excel, Notes, Research and Power BI.

Wrong information
Information not updated
No useful filters
No opportunity curation
Inefficient customer support
Too many channels
Incomplete client profile
Control outside the platform
Multitasking
Accessibility

03 — Constraints

Three limits shaped the work: whose approval it needed, who owned the product decisions, and how each step was signed off.

Each vertical defined the MVP differently, and each director could veto.

Nobody was responsible for defining the product and deciding what came first, so I took it on, through the two workshops in section 04.

Each step needed approval from the board of the four vertical directors, so the concept had to be clear to business directors as well as to designers.

04 — Process & key decisions

The work ran in two phases: Concept Design to win approval, then Detailed Design to make it buildable. Three principles ran through both: customizable (each office sets up its own dashboard), multitasking (several clients and tools open at once) and propositional (the platform suggests opportunities instead of waiting to be asked).

research → concept design → concept test → refinement → project definition → business approval
Me, with tech leads and business directors

detailed design → usability test → refinement → design spec → handover → business approval
Me as design lead, plus 4 product designers

I designed 21 features covering an advisor's whole workday, then showed the board only the nine that made the strongest case for the concept.

Instead of a separate version for each vertical, each office chooses the widgets (small panels such as goals, clients or calendar) that appear on its dashboard. One codebase serves the four verticals' different ways of working.

In the first workshop, the tech, business and design leads mapped every feature and rated each one for impact against effort. In the second, each vertical proposed its own first release, and we merged them into one.

My team set up an "Advisors + Design Group" of volunteer advisors. It became the research pool for all of BTG design.

05 — The solution

Each part answers findings from the interviews. The dashboard puts an office's own information on one screen (too many channels). The side menu, the tool rail in the first figure, keeps each tool one click away (multitasking). The client page gathers everything about one client (incomplete client profile). Opportunity matching brings suggestions to the advisor (no opportunity curation).

The dashboard offers six widgets: Metas (goals), Clientes (clients), Produtos (products), Tickets (support tickets), Movimentações (transactions) and Agenda (calendar). We arrived at them through around 150 prototypes.

The dashboard in edit mode. When an office sets up its dashboard, it chooses the widgets its advisors work from, so they open the platform to the information their vertical uses.

The client page as a workspace. When an advisor opens a client, the client's investments, profile and the advisor's tools are on one page, so the advisor doesn't collect them from separate systems.

Opportunity matching. The platform matches investment opportunities to each client's profile and shows them to the advisor, who no longer searches for them by hand.

06 — Impact

Results from the concept test and the approval that followed. These are scores from testing the concept, before anything shipped.

Results

90%feature acceptance in the concept test, 9 advisors across 3 verticals
85%acceptance for tabs that work like browser tabs
4 → 1verticals' separate MVP proposals merged into one prioritised MVP

The board approved the concept. Two findings from the test changed what was built: the side menu, which had only icons, needed text labels, and the client page was too sparse for advisors used to dense data.

07 — What I learned

Getting four directors to agree was part of the design work. Until they had all seen the same tradeoffs, any design could be vetoed by one of them.

How I split the team mattered more than how I briefed it. Each designer owned a module, not a vertical, so every module had to serve all four verticals, and design reviews discussed the product instead of each vertical's demands.

In the concept test, advisors scored each screen instead of giving opinions. The scores gave the board a number it could trust, and gave me findings I hadn't looked for.

08 — What this case doesn't cover

The case runs from the first interviews to board approval. What happened after that is not covered:

The 90% and 85% are concept-test scores, not shipped results. I left before usage could be measured.

Wealth was left out of the first MVP and never researched here. The modular dashboard may not hold for it.

The concept, structure and prioritisation are mine; the detailed work inside each module belongs to the four designers I led.

Three modules were in build when I left. I can’t show what changed after handover.

Next case study

Modular card insurance in a banking app

BTG Pactual