Making wealth management and investment accessible to the Caribbean masses
CONTEXT
Kyra is a new fintech solution focused on lowering the barriers of entry to investment and wealth management in the small twin island nation of Trinidad and Tobago by offering accessible and affordable digital investment plans to low and middle income class earners.
The investing landscape in Trinidad and Tobago - and the Caribbean by extension - is fairly bare bones. Existing options include exclusive wealth management firms with high capital requirements, traditional banking investment arms that require individuals to go through lengthy vetting processes or meet with advisors in person to inquire about opportunities, generic mutual funds with marginal returns from small mom-and-pop credit unions, or grass roots informal arrangements called sou-sous.
Kyra set out to revolutionise this by leveraging technology to create a simple and intuitive digital investment ecosystem to empower the low and middle class to build wealth on their own terms. The 4-part product included an onboarding and investment matching app to allow users to customize a plan best suited to their goals that then allowed users access to a financial management and tracking portal, a back office / CRM portal to allow Kyra admin team members to manage and triage client information and investment plans, and an LMS to provide exclusive educational content to Kyra customers.
SUMMARY
As lead UX designer at Quoviz - the agency enlisted to help Kyra with their vision - I was responsible for 0-1 product development on Kyra, which included designing the website, creating the onboarding flow for the customer-facing app, and creating the backend Admin / Customer management app, that helped grow the product to USD $500k AUM in 6 months.
My work for Phase I of the project focused on laying the foundation for the MVP by distilling complex business and user requirements into defined experiences and features, writing PRDs, and holding multiple interviews with potential users to gather in-depth insights into what an ideal solution looked like.
In Phase II, I owned all aspects of the design cycle, from discovery to feature definition, user research to user flows, wireframing to prototyping, visual and brand identity creation, and more. I worked on designing workflows and processes for the various experiences, implementing a nascent design system, and designed, tested and iterated hundreds of prototypes across the product’s four key modules / experiences - Kyra Ask (financial onboarding and goal setting flow), Kyra Biz (back office / Admin CRM and document management system), Kyra Learn (a bespoke LMS to help educate users), and Kyra Trak (user-facing backend portal for plan and investment management)
COMPANY
Kyra Investment
INDUSTRY
Fintech
Investment Services
ROLE
Lead UX Designer
DURATION
Sept 2020 - Jan 2022
TEAM
3 Front End Engineers
1 Back End Engineer
1 Business Analyst
1 Project Manager
PROJECT TYPE
Web App
Website
Key Projects
I worked on many more projects during my time at Kyra; if you're interested in chatting more about them, reach out to me.
Financial Onboarding and Goal Setting (Phase II)
BUSINESS NEED
Kyra initially started as a brick-and-mortar solution managed by a team of advisors, compliance officers, and general admin. While this worked during the initial stages when the brand was trying to build trust, and establish themselves as a new but viable contender in the financial market, they quickly realised that the approach was time-consuming and not scalable.
Onboarding (goal setting and plan generation) was an especially tedious task because of the number of variables that went into generating a bespoke plan, and the amount of time it took a Kyra team member to get details from a prospective customer. Their current process included an elaborate and inefficient workflow that involved a Google Form, a manual follow up / call, a massive data-heavy Google sheet that stored user information, a secondary sheet to generate plan-related calculated fields, and then manually creating a contract PDF and supporting documents with the customer’s finalised plan for review and sign-off.
Compounding that was the large amount of mandatory KYC, regulatory documentation, and forms that users had to fill and drop off prior to actually being able to fund / contribute to their custom plan, that in turn needed review and sign off.
GOAL
Design an onboarding flow that requires minimal Admin intervention to guide a user through setting a financial goal, generating a custom investment plan, and submitting key KYC information as quickly and painlessly as possible.
MY ROLE
While Trinidad and Tobago’s regulatory obligations require all digital KYC approaches follow a prescribed, tedious process, my task was to identify opportunities to make the experience manageable and hassle-free, wherever possible.
As lead UX designer, I developed a conditional, contextual flow that guided users through setting up a financial goal and signing up for a custom investment plan, while subtly educating them on the benefits of investing over saving. Ease of use aside, my approach focused on adding business value by lowering user frustration and friction, driving onboarding, reducing churn, maximising lead generation, and lowering time to value, all while staying within the strict confines of the legal compliance and regulatory requirements.
Artifacts from the onboarding flow were funneled into a supporting backend app that allowed Admin and compliance personnel to intervene, triage, review, follow up, and sign off on KYC and other plan documents.
Business (Admin) App (Phase II)
BUSINESS NEED
To support their back office processes, the Kyra team needed for a centralised hub to allow Admins from different departments to carry out their functions digitally.
The business development and outreach team needed a way to intervene and help customers complete their financial goal setting and onboarding; compliance and legal teams needed a way to triage and review documents, contracts, and other KYC artifacts that came out of a customer’s onboarding, accounting and finance teams needed a way to track funds and follow up on delinquent payments, and marketing and customer service teams needed a CRM to house all customer-related information and data points.
GOAL
Create a backend portal that allows disparate business teams (compliance, finance, business development, and marketing) to successfully complete their individual tasks. The hybrid system needed to merge multiple requirements from complementary departments into a seamless experience that wasn’t content-heavy, cluttered, or conflated.
MY ROLE
I spearheaded scoping, user research, user interviews, journey mapping, and wireframing for the Business App, stopping short of screen flows, visual design, interactive prototyping, and usability testing, as I moved countries (and jobs) mid-project.
My work focused primarily on content design, organizing the product’s information hierarch, and outlining what features and functionality each individual module - tailored to the various departments - would contain.
Website Redesign (Phase II)
BUSINESS NEED
The original Kyra website was a simple landing page that lacked proper branding, storytelling, and visuals, and did a poor job of conveying the product’s value proposition. Preliminary heuristic evaluations highlighted fragmented visual narrative and inconsistent branding, and revealed that most users stumbled upon the site without fully understanding what it was.
The skeleton website - with no clear calls to action, a dearth of information, and an abundance of usability issues - wasn’t serving any strategic purpose (lead generation, product awareness, increasing sign ups etc), aside from fulfilling a management directive to have some sort of online presence. To support the brand’s new digital-first footprint, a complete redesign was needed.
GOAL
Create a website that adheres to basic UX best practices and clearly communicates what the product is, how it works, and what differentiates it from other similar financial products in the market.
MY ROLE
Since there wasn’t much to work with, the decision was made to scrap the original website in its entirety and eschew ‘redesign’ in favor of a complete overhaul. I envisioned a new sitemap and worked a UX content writer to identify core content areas that were needed to effectively sell the product, culminating in a robust content strategy aligned with the team’s business goals and specific website KPIs.
I then worked to define the brand’s look and feel along with Kyra’s in-house Creative Director, and designed a fresh new website that