Designing a financial advice service

Print, sign, scan, email

That was how a client gave an adviser permission to look at their existing pensions. They downloaded a Letter of Authority, printed it, signed it, scanned it and emailed it back. Then they waited, often for weeks, with no idea what was happening.

The Letter of Authority is the document that lets a financial adviser act on a client's behalf with their other pension providers. Without it, advice can't start. And every step around it was manual: lots of hand-offs, lots of emails. Clients lost track of where things were. Advisers spent their time chasing paperwork.

The bank was launching a new financial advice service, and pensions were a big part of it. My question was simple: how do you make a complex, regulated and paper-heavy journey feel clear for someone who is already nervous about their retirement money?

My role

I led the design of the Self-Invested Personal Pension (SIPP) advice journeys, across several streams of work on the product roadmap. I owned the end-to-end journey design, prototyping, stakeholder alignment work. I worked with product, engineering, operations, advisers, compliance and legal.

Helping clients add their pension details

Before a client can get advice, they need to tell us about the pensions they hold with other providers. This was where many people dropped out.

Pension words are hard. "Defined benefit", "defined contribution" and "policy number" mean different things to different people. Clients with several pensions often didn't know what we were asking for, or where to find it.

I redesigned this step with guidance at each stage. It helps clients work out which type of pension they have, explains what each field is asking for, and shows them where to find details like their policy number, without having to call anyone.

I gave clients the help they needed at the moment they needed it, and nothing more. Enough to keep going with confidence, without overwhelming them with information they didn't need yet.

Signing the Letter of Authority on a phone

The Letter of Authority slowed down the whole advice journey. So I redesigned it to be digital first. Clients can now review and sign it on their phone in one session, using electronic signatures and integrations with third party providers.

To get there, I first mapped the old manual process in detail, every hand-off and every delay. Then I worked with product and operations to agree what we could move online and which constraints had to stay.

Compliance and legal set a high bar. This document lets an adviser act on someone's financial affairs. So every screen had to be clear about what the client was agreeing to, and make sure they understood it before they signed.

Showing clients where their transfer is

After a client signs, moving their pension can still take several weeks. That wait is where clients start to worry. Is something wrong? Do I need to do anything?

I designed a progress tracker that shows clients which stage their transfer is at and what comes next. It follows the real stages of the process, and it makes it clear when the client needs to act and when they only need to wait.

This meant fewer clients contacting the team to ask for updates, and a smoother hand-over between the app and the adviser.

Bringing the design files together

As the work grew, the Figma files spread across several streams and became hard to navigate. New designers spent their first days untangling files before they could help. Engineers and product owners couldn't see the full journey in one place.

I brought all the key SIPP journeys into one shared Figma file. New team members got up to speed faster, screens stayed consistent, and the whole team had one place to see how the journeys connect.

People often call this housekeeping. On this project it made the whole team faster.

What I learned

People making decisions about their pension are often anxious, confused, or both. In this kind of product, my job is to remove uncertainty at every step.

The Letter of Authority work showed me again something I've seen in every regulated business I've worked in. The biggest improvements come from understanding the operational process behind the journey. The friction was a process problem, and it needed a design solution.