Perfecting Private Equity

Intralinks is the leading cloud-based financial technology platform for secure document sharing and collaboration, investing, and banking and securities. InvestorVision is one of Intralinks’s many enterprise applications for alternative investments.

MY ROLE

I was the design lead, responsible for the end-to-end design process of the admin portal:
Research
Design
Testing

TEAM

Rishi Kanna, Director of Alternative Assets Technology
Michael Tyrrell, Head of Product
Arun Dugganapally, Product Manager
Seth Blech, Tech Lead
Alex Rodriguez, Engineer
Zachary Harris, Engineer
Arton Mirakaj, Engineer
Vamshedhar Reddy, Engineer
Sridhar Cherukupally, Engineer
Dragos Bostan, Engineer
Raj Palanki, Engineer
Dror Nadler, Engineer

At Intralinks I had the opportunity to design finance software for a diverse group of customers — from small firms to companies of over 10,000 employees — with significant variation in roles and responsibilities.

Designing a single product to support this amount of variation was a new and exciting challenge. Coming from a consumer background, I learned very quickly that the context and goals of designing SaaS products can be very different. I would have to shift my way of thinking to cater to the scale and ambiguity of enterprise projects.

THE PROBLEM

Investors today are demanding more: More data, more reporting and more visibility into day-to-day fund operations. When it comes to the world of private equity and fund administration, there are many moving parts, and managing these many parts can be a burdensome task. Current solutions are disparate, lacking a cohesive product that serves both fund managers and investors.

Old: When I joined Intralinks, the team was midway through the process of building the Investor (LP) Portal. My first task was to elevate the UI by refining the styles, components and patterns.

New: Our investors expect to easily access documents and data, and modern, innovative data visualization and analytics. I wanted the UI and visual design to look consumer, but feel enterprise.

GOALS

Making Finance Modern

The goal was to build a SaaS application that makes managing financial data and documents, and investor relations a seamless experience.

High level goals:

Create a modern, clean and elegant UI
Build a front-end on top of the existing fund services platform
Build three experiences for three different user types in tandem
Build a product that is user-driven, rather than feature-driven

Hypothesis:

Since this is a SaaS product, most users will be using the application often
As a SaaS application, users expect a custom experience
Users may use one or more products, therefore, the experience should be seamless across all applications

SOLUTION

Managing Multitasking

The solution was to create a premier investor portal and management platform that makes it easy for investors to track and manage investments across funds, modernizes communications and reporting for admins managing a single fund or multiple funds, track investor activity, and upload critical data effortlessly.

GP and LP portal relationships

DISCOVERY

Picking Up the Pieces

I had no insight into the world of private equity firms, fund and portfolio administration. I had to become an “expert”, conduct competitive research, watch product demos, and gain insights from users. I conducted remote and in-person interviews with 15 participants among our paid subscriber base and internal stakeholders, including CSMs, sales team members, internal users, and subject matter experts.

Early insights:

The product should support the full fund lifecycle — solutions are disparate and do not support the necessary workflows
Current solutions are overly complex and laborious to use.
The product needs to integrate with the larger ecosystem (data integration)
The problem was much bigger in scope than I initially realized — we would need to design one solution for a very diverse set of stakeholders that need to collaborate in many different ways and at different points throughout the fund lifecycle

InvestorVision stakeholders

"I need to know that sensitive financial data is secure."

Fund lifecycle

Further Insights

InvestorVision needed to be purpose built for the needs of general partner (GPs) admins, investors (limited partners or LPs), and third party users. Before I could jump into the design process, it was important to understand GP (fund admin/manager) workflows and how the experience would scale.

How might we create a single portal solution that supports the full fund lifecycle?

End-to-end user flow (GP to LP)

Design Principles

As I began the design process, the following values informed my design strategy:

Transparency
Admins should be able to easily see and manage investor documents and data

Efficiency
Designed around GP (admin) workflows

Security
Admins need to know sensitive documents are secure

Scalability
The product needs to effectively support both large and small GPs

GP Portal

LP Portal

Scalable Solutions

For enterprise products, it’s the software’s job to support how different organizations work. Different companies have different processes and designing a single product to support all of them requires special consideration.

A product’s target market often consists of companies of varying sizes, structures, and cultures. Differences that collectively mean they’ll all need slightly different things from their software. It requires designing features to be generalizable, with the ability to support variation in process around a single use case.

Given the stakeholder variation of InvestorVision, we would need to design a unified experience that would support all users.

The three main experiences

Working closely with the Head of Product and Director of Alternative Assets Technology, I began to establish the architecture for the Admin (GP) Portal. Keeping efficiency and scalability at the forefront of this process, I established three templates for the Admin Portal:

Dashboard/Overview Page
List Page
Add/Details Page

All pages within InvestorVision adhere to one of these three templates.

1. Evolution of the Admin Dashboard

2. Evolution of the Admin List Page

3. Evolution of the Admin Add Page

Multi GP manager use case: As an admin I need to be able to easily access data for multiple general partners (GPs) at a high-level or drill down into a single GP for more granular data.

Multi GP Admin Dashboard

Multi GP Admin List Page

Multi GP Admin Overview Page

Single GP manager use case: As an admin I want to be able upload necessary data and manage client relations across funds.

Single GP Admin Dashboard

Single GP Admin List Page

Single GP Admin Overview Page

EXPLORE

Documents & User Permissions

Exploring the use case of the single GP admin, document and user management are essential workflows for the GP admin. InvestorVision has a powerful, flexible permissions system to give admins detailed control over which users have access to which documents.

Publishing and Posting Documents

Documents can be published to different "levels". These levels have a cascading effect — the higher the level, the more general the document.

Document upload variations

During the discovery process, we identified the process variation the design should support:

Upload documents
Publishing and unpublishing of a document
View documents
Download documents
Delete documents
Schedule publication
Split documents
Notify users when documents have been published

1. Documents List Page – Upload Document

2-5. Document Overview Page

6. Add Document – Schedule Publish Date

7. Split Document – Review

8. Add Document – Review Notifications

User Permissions

User permissions use the same levels, where users with more specific permissions will have access to all documents published at higher levels.

Permissions uses a role-based access control model, which uses roles to categorize users and manage permissions for each role, saving admins’ a lot of time. It also makes it easier to configure permissions by working the way administrators think. Additionally, permissions can be added via groups for added flexibility.

Permissions variations

REFINE

Putting It All Together

Each one of the above features collectively adds up to a powerful and flexible interface that can support tremendous variation in the process.

The final product was built to be general enough to scale as functionality was added, and specific enough to meet the needs of our users. With a deep understanding of the world of private equity, the intricacies of the fund lifecycle, and a focus on stakeholders and the end-user, we were able to build a product that is efficient, transparent, secure and scalable.

The design of InvestorVision is modern and bold, and conveys a sense of importance and trust. Customers resonated with the updated UI and visual design, which optimizes for space, size, and typographic structure. Since this is a SaaS application, I intentionally created a clean, streamlined design, allowing for users to make their portal more about them, rather than us.

Trade-offs

Data-dense applications run the risk of becoming burdened with clutter, making it difficult to parse information. To keep the UI clean, some content was not surfaced. However, this is a complex product that requires some additional discoverability as a new user, and since this is an enterprise product, most users will be using the product often. Given these trade-offs, the team decided they were worthwhile to promote ease of use and consistent pattern usage throughout, creating a better user experience.

Data table with surfaced actions

Data table with hidden actions

Challenges

Building and shipping financial SaaS products is incredibly complex. In addition to working with complex systems and workflows, one has to take into account compliance and regulatory requirements, as well as a very diverse set of stakeholders and many varied use cases.

Shifting the conversation from one about features and functions to one about users and user outcomes, so we could deliver more useful, usable, and desirable solutions, was a departure from the usual way of thinking about enterprise products.

Learnings

Designing and building products for enterprise customers vs consumer users is a very different experience. The success of many consumer experiences can be attributed to their simplicity and focus. Solve one, focused use case really well, and you may be successful.

In the case of enterprise software, convincing companies to pay for software, rather than consumers to pay with their attention, creates a different dynamic. You’re typically designing to support an existing business process — to make it faster, easier, or more collaborative. Implementation may require individual behavioral change, but you're generally not designing for organizational process change.

That said, it’s important to design and build with the future in mind. Companies and industries change, which will often introduce new functional demands, requiring them to be generalizable or scalable in new ways.

IMPACT

Results

We continue to listen to our users, adding features such as customization, CRM functionality, document approval workflows, additional insights and analytics for investors, and SSO.

Sales for the investor portal increased by 113% in 2020
Support requests decreased by 20%
Built in React, load time is > 5 seconds

GET IN TOUCH!