Overview

How might we…help chief reporting officers and their teams at major financial institutions collect, compute, analyze, and prepare financial data for review by governmental regulators quickly?

Problem

Before financial institutions can generate reports for regulatory agencies they receive data from vendors in an unusable format, leading to additional work on their end. Moreover, the provided data lacks the insights necessary to allow the institution to anticipate needs.

Kickoff

There were strong opinions on what the user experience should be. It was not clear to myself or the team at that time what problem we were solving nor possessed any domain knowledge

Success

A comprehensive approach to financial management, marked by key factors such as launching support for tax-related activities, monitoring total expense ratios, and implementing advanced "extension" financial reporting.

Now

• Launch support for Tax

• Total expense ratio

• Extension financial reporting

• Draft comments

Next

• Executive reporting

• Workstream status

• Reports submitted

• Data fabric risks

Later

• Complete NAV oversight

• Self-service reporting

• Automated predictive alerts

  
  

Building Empathy

Personas

Two roles inside of every financial institution are the pivotal figures shaping the landscape of financial management. The Head of Reporting is regularly crafting meticulous executive reports to inform boardroom decisions, while the Tax Director navigates complex regulatory landscapes to ensure compliance and minimize risk.

Subject matter experts

In a series of meetings, both in person and online, I collaborated with internal financial experts in NYC & London to grasp the nuances of financial reporting.

Ultimately, I discovered that EY offers a range of services, all intricately tied to various SEC requirements.

Design

Taking the existing sales-led approach and transforming into a product-led growth model was not going to be easy. It meant moving away from traditional sales tactics and towards a model where the product's value could be realized directly by the users through enhanced data accessibility, seamless integration, and a robust self-service ecosystem.

Product Strategy

APP STORE

There was an identified need to allocate a space for all the other groups in EY to release their point solutions that leverage the same architecture.

DATA LAYER

Processed, or "clean," data requires a designated space to reside and serve all the services effectively. Our team collaborated closely with the data architects to ensure the availability of reusable components across apps.

THIRD-PARTY API

In a sales-led approach, EY generated revenue by building bespoke applications. Pivoting to this model required opening an API channel so that those applications could continue, albeit at a reduced rate.

Concepts

This was akin to a matrix within a matrix. CROs needed to track not only the workflow of how this data was being created but also its accuracy, compounded by the fact that this data was incredibly complex.

Identifying opportunities to simplify, I was able to pinpoint types of charts that would convey insights from large datasets swiftly.

Prototypes

Reporting officer experience

Various types of graphs (gauges, radials, progress, steppers, etc) were used to allow valuable insights to surface to chief risk officers.

Data analyst experience

There were various visualizations the auditors could select for the chief risk officers to see from the managed service pane of the application.

Stakeholder Reaction

"Yeah, so if what we're doing is consolidating the data into a lake and our assumption is that any data anomalies that we find will be fixed at that level, then that actually helps us quite a bit because some of the services that we were envisioning were things like general ledger oversight and like booking"