Wealth Insight for PNC Bank

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Message Wealth Insight Today’s investors want greater transparency in their dealings with financial institutions and advisors, a desire that increased during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. PNC Financial Services Group, whose Asset Management Group is ranked by Barron’s as one of the top 10 bank managers in the country, approached IDEO to help it address these investor trends by designing a comprehensive online wealth-management tool called Wealth Insight. Building on PNC Bank’s previous award-winning collaboration with IDEO on its Gen Y-focused Virtual Wallet service, Wealth Insight’s virtual dashboard gives clients unparalleled views into their investment portfolio, empowers them to make informed decisions, and enhances collaboration between clients and advisors. The project began with a hypothesis that wealthy clients would want to be “co-pilots” and actively participate in investment decision-making with their advisors. After conducting four rounds of in-context research with dozens of financial advisors and investors, as well as CEOs, entrepreneurs, lottery winners, and dot.com millionaires throughout the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, however, the IDEO team discovered that while investors liked the option of working side-by-side with their advisors, most preferred the freedom and ease of hiring dedicated experts to manage their money for them. What was most important to these “enlightened delegators” was the ability to have daily access to financial performance reports and aggregated views of their net worth. (Think logging on to Mint.com versus receiving quarterly statements in the mail.) To tease out what types of features, information, and data visualizations “enlightened delegators” would find most helpful and intuitive to use, the IDEO team brought prototypes into the field with them—ranging from pencil sketches to a high-fidelity HTML prototype that used real data—to get feedback. The designs were continuously iterated upon and developed during the multiple rounds of research. The result of this back-and-forth research and prototyping effort is a virtual dashboard that is clear, simple, engaging, and organized the way consumers think about money. PNC Wealth Insight lets clients view a summary of their entire portfolio in seconds, or dive in deeper for more details. Contextual factors that influence a client’s financial circumstances (market forces, advisor activity, and their own deposits and withdrawals) are clearly highlighted and color-coded. Central to the Wealth Insight offer—and what separates it from the competition—is the ability for clients to customize how they view their assets. Accounts can be looked at individually, fluidly assembled into groups, or instantly compared via drag-and-drop functionality. Other innovative features include: • A “personal balance sheet” called Net Worth that shows assets and liabilities at PNC with the ability to aggregate outside account information. • My Folio customized account groupings, a dynamic portfolio-management tool. • Income, an instant display of monthly deposits and withdrawals that allows past comparisons and estimates future income. • Performance views across multiple time frames including displays of daily rate of return or percentage gain or loss. • A quick overview of all holdings called Brief. • And Allocation comparisons showing target values. PNC launched Wealth Insight in September 2011. According to CEO James Rohr, “The product is a game changer that will give us a tremendous competitive advantage in the marketplace.” Customer reviews have been very positive: “They tell me it’s like driving a sports car and being exhilarated when you realize you’re only in first gear,” says Rohr. PNC advisors have also begun to benefit from the new service. Quarterly mailed statements used to “trigger a deluge of calls” from clients, says Robert Reilly, head of PNC Wealth Management. “Now calls are more evenly spread out,” according to Reilly. Mobile application versions of Wealth Insight will be available for iPhone and Android in 2012. http://www.ideo.com/work/wealth-insight

Today’s investors want greater transparency in their dealings with financial institutions and advisors, a desire that increased during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. PNC Financial Services Group, whose Asset Management Group is ranked by Barron’s as one of the top 10 bank managers in the country, approached IDEO to help it address these investor trends by designing a comprehensive online wealth-management tool called Wealth Insight. Building on PNC Bank’s previous award-winning collaboration with IDEO on its Gen Y-focused Virtual Wallet service, Wealth Insight’s virtual dashboard gives clients unparalleled views into their investment portfolio, empowers them to make informed decisions, and enhances collaboration between clients and advisors.

The project began with a hypothesis that wealthy clients would want to be “co-pilots” and actively participate in investment decision-making with their advisors. After conducting four rounds of in-context research with dozens of financial advisors and investors, as well as CEOs, entrepreneurs, lottery winners, and dot.com millionaires throughout the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, however, the IDEO team discovered that while investors liked the option of working side-by-side with their advisors, most preferred the freedom and ease of hiring dedicated experts to manage their money for them. What was most important to these “enlightened delegators” was the ability to have daily access to financial performance reports and aggregated views of their net worth. (Think logging on to Mint.com versus receiving quarterly statements in the mail.)

To tease out what types of features, information, and data visualizations “enlightened delegators” would find most helpful and intuitive to use, the IDEO team brought prototypes into the field with them—ranging from pencil sketches to a high-fidelity HTML prototype that used real data—to get feedback. The designs were continuously iterated upon and developed during the multiple rounds of research.

The result of this back-and-forth research and prototyping effort is a virtual dashboard that is clear, simple, engaging, and organized the way consumers think about money. PNC Wealth Insight lets clients view a summary of their entire portfolio in seconds, or dive in deeper for more details. Contextual factors that influence a client’s financial circumstances (market forces, advisor activity, and their own deposits and withdrawals) are clearly highlighted and color-coded. Central to the Wealth Insight offer—and what separates it from the competition—is the ability for clients to customize how they view their assets. Accounts can be looked at individually, fluidly assembled into groups, or instantly compared via drag-and-drop functionality.

Other innovative features include:
• A “personal balance sheet” called Net Worth that shows assets and liabilities at PNC with the ability to aggregate outside account information.
• My Folio customized account groupings, a dynamic portfolio-management tool.
• Income, an instant display of monthly deposits and withdrawals that allows past comparisons and estimates future income.
• Performance views across multiple time frames including displays of daily rate of return or percentage gain or loss.
• A quick overview of all holdings called Brief.
• And Allocation comparisons showing target values.

PNC launched Wealth Insight in September 2011. According to CEO James Rohr, “The product is a game changer that will give us a tremendous competitive advantage in the marketplace.” Customer reviews have been very positive: “They tell me it’s like driving a sports car and being exhilarated when you realize you’re only in first gear,” says Rohr. PNC advisors have also begun to benefit from the new service. Quarterly mailed statements used to “trigger a deluge of calls” from clients, says Robert Reilly, head of PNC Wealth Management. “Now calls are more evenly spread out,” according to Reilly. Mobile application versions of Wealth Insight will be available for iPhone and Android in 2012.