Model Center

Centralized marketplace for model portfolios to promote Asset Manager’s products and help Financial Advisor grow their business more efficiently.

My role as a lead designer of Model Center MVP is to own the end-to-end design process, from early strategy phase translating early concepts into actionable designs, to refine interaction, IA and conduct evaluative research via usability testing and user interviews.

In close collaboration with an agile team: Product Manager and 5 Developers, as well as cross-UX partners: Researcher, Visual Designer and Design Systems Designers, we launched the product in November 2022 and have successfully attracted customers like BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and many more top-notch Asset Managers.

Learn more about FactSet Model Center: Product Page | Press Release

“Do you have a background in finance prior to FactSet?”

This is a common question I get asked by interviewees. Nope. I had absolutely no clue what FactSet actually did despite hours of company research, but I’m doing fine. I have been leading designs for this innovative product and other 0-1 products or features for financial professionals such as Traders, Portfolio Managers and more. That’s the beauty in UX. We don’t have to start as subject matter experts, but we learn how to become experts in our user.

Why Model Center?

Before we dive in, here are some key terms:

  • Model Portfolio - an investment strategy made with a collection of stocks, mutual funds, ETFs and others to achieve certain financial goals.

  • Asset Manager - an institutional asset management firm, who creates and sells models to profit from their models’ underlying investments (in-house mutual funds or ETFs).

  • Financial Advisor - makes investment decisions on behalf of their clients.

More and more Financial Advisors are leveraging model portfolios to manage client assets more efficiently. In 2021, the Assets Under Management of model portfolios reached 1.5 trillion dollars in the US (according to Broadridge), and it is projected to continue growing. FactSet saw an opportunity to centralize model distribution for Asset Managers to capitalize on AUM, and for Financial Advisors to streamline the process of model search to adoption.

One product, two experiences

As a marketplace for model portfolios, I’m constantly challenged to satisfy both sellers’ and buyers’ experiences and make the right trade-offs. Not only can the designs for one party impact the other, but the business model sometimes requires the experience to be more favorable for sellers even though it might not be ideal for buyers.

Wearing both hats - Asset Manager’s (seller) and Financial Advisor’s (buyer) - is challenging, but there are UX techniques to help systematically unpack complex flows and different user needs. Making a compromise between two users, on the other hand, is way harder. Fortunately, having built rapport with my stakeholders, we are to debate over the business and user goals and collaboratively make a decision on who we should favor that benefits the business more.

One of the most valuable learnings from this project is to develop a better business mindset and put the UX Venn diagram into practice, as I firsthand experience that product success lies in the intersection of user and business.

UX Venn Diagram, Source: Google Images