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J.P.Morgan Chase
Accelerating client onboarding in private banking: redefining client
experiences with a cutting-edge design and operational software.
My role: Product Designer
Scope: Client Onboarding Application
Duration: April 2022- June 2023
Context
J.P. Morgan Private Bank is one of the world’s leading financial institutions, trusted by high-net-worth clients with highly complex financial needs. The onboarding process is mission-critical. It’s the very first experience clients have with the bank, setting the tone for the entire relationship.
The objective was to build a digital-first, systematized onboarding experience that:
Establishes client trust from the first interaction.
Compresses onboarding time from weeks to minutes.
Creates an operational backbone that scales with the bank’s growth.
Challenge
Despite its prestige, the bank’s onboarding process was slow and opaque. Bringing on a new client could take 4–45 days, weighed down by:
Fragmented tools and offline data storage.
Multiple compliance hand-offs and duplicated reviews.
Lack of visibility for bankers and analysts, leading to delays and frustration.
This experience created a gap between client expectations (fast, digital) and the bank’s operational reality.
Opportunity
The onboarding experience wasn’t just a bottleneck, it was an opportunity to build a stronger relationship with the clients. By reimagining it as a seamless, digital-first system, J.P. Morgan could:
Win client trust early: Deliver a first impression that matched the bank’s reputation for excellence.
Unlock operational efficiency: Reduce manual work, errors, and duplicated effort across compliance, operations, and client teams.
Create a future-proof system: Build a modular foundation that scales with growth and integrates new regulations or edge-case flows without major rework.
Approach
Before designing solutions, I made sure to consider how the tool operates and behaves across the four axis of work: business, human, mechanical, and data. Each of these play a crucial part in building an efficient tool that considers the human interacting with it, in relation to other verticals of the event.
Phase III : Collaboration Engine
Aligned 100+ stakeholders (PMs, engineers, analysts, legal/compliance) around one shared visualization of the process.
Design
Rather than incremental design changes, I built features that changed how the system works and how teams get work done:
Progressive Disclosure
Redesigned the experience so the system thinks ahead for users- surfacing the right details at the right moment. This cut onboarding time, and nearly eliminated lost documents.The result: fewer escalations, faster account processing, and a smoother experience for both teams and clients.
Comparator Dashboard + Error Analysis
Turned error resolution from manual work into an automated process. The dashboard highlights discrepancies in real time, enabling teams to fix issues before they cause delays- improving data accuracy and cutting rework cycles.
Quick Assist Feature
Integrated ticket creation directly into the workflow, eliminating the need to switch tools or interrupt progress. This reduces resolution time, keeps momentum high, and ensures cases are resolved without falling through the cracks.
Behind the build
Mapping the System
I started by visualizing every user, decision point, and data flow across four critical axes:
Business: Risk, compliance, and regulatory requirements.
Human: Bankers, analysts, and clients interacting with the process.
Mechanical: Tools, workflows, and integrations that powered onboarding.
Data: Document status, metadata, and information hand-offs.
Finding the Leverage Points
Instead of fixing symptoms, I asked: “Where can we intervene to create more impact?”
Bottlenecks → turned into clear progress indicators.
Data silos → unified into a single comparator dashboard.
Manual hand-offs → automated with status signifiers and collaboration tools.
Building a Living Prototype
I created a 200+ screen clickable prototype that became the shared truth for product, engineering, and compliance teams. It wasn’t just a mockup. It was an operational tool we used to:
Test real compliance edge cases.
Align teams on business rules and exception handling.
Iterate fast before committing engineering resources
Outcomes & Impact
Time Compression: Cut onboarding time from 4–45 days to under 1 minute for data gathering.Anomaly detection time cut from 12 hours → 15 minutes
Trust & Transparency: Stakeholders gained end-to-end visibility into document status and ownership.
Scalable Model: Modular design enables new workflows without heavy re-architecture.
Reflection
This project reinforced that systems design is organizational alignment.
Visualizing people, data, and decisions turns chaos into a shared playbook.
The four-axis model we created became the single source of truth across triads, accelerating design and development cycles.