Led product design for the software financial advisors use to check client investments, work out tax, and plan where money should sit. Around 800 advisors used it every day. I cut the time to review one portfolio nearly in half.
The problem
Reviewing one client portfolio took 25 minutes against a 12-minute target. About 9 of those minutes went on jumping between four sections to make numbers agree that should have agreed already.
What I did
Put all four sections on one screen, had the software flag disagreements itself, and let advisors open any headline number down to the calculation behind it.
The result
The Stakes
Outcomes
TCS built this platform for a large Indian banking group. It is the screen around 800 advisors sit in front of all day, checking investments for ordinary and wealthy clients. It had everything an advisor needed: returns, tax forecasts, plans for where money should sit, and risk checks. The numbers in it were correct. Getting to them was the problem.
I joined as Senior Product Designer to redesign the dashboards and the way advisors move through them. The brief on day one was a number. Advisors were averaging 25 minutes on a portfolio review against a 12-minute target. At that scale the slowness sits directly in what the bank pays for advice.
Client
Large Indian banking group (B2B SaaS)
Industry
Wealth Management · Financial Services
Advisor Base
~800 RMs across 3 regional clusters
Portfolios/Month
~50,000 reviewed
Modules
4 (Returns, Tax, Allocation, Risk)
SLA Target
12 min per portfolio review
The pattern showed up on the first day of interviews. Advisors were not spending 25 minutes analysing a portfolio. About 9 minutes of every review went on jumping between four separate sections of the software, trying to make numbers agree that should have agreed already. The analysis was quick. The software was making people check things by hand that it should have checked itself.
"I open returns, copy the number into a notepad, switch to tax, copy the next number, switch to allocation, copy the third. Then I open a fourth tab to do the math myself because the platform won't tell me if they reconcile."
— RM, 4 years tenure, workflow interviewI used four separate sources of evidence. None of them proved much alone, but together they were clear. The analysis side of the product was strong. Moving around it was costing the bank an entire target review time on every single portfolio.
I went through three comparable tools used elsewhere in the industry. Published reviews put a typical portfolio review at 12 to 15 minutes. This platform was 10 to 13 minutes behind, and almost none of that gap was about missing features. It was about how the product was arranged. That gave me a realistic target and a number the business could hold me to.
Advisors were cross-checking numbers, not hunting for them. Only the canvas fixed the cause, not the symptom.
The single screen was the right call and it had a real cost. The top 18% of advisors, who bring in 40% of revenue, had memorised the old layout and moved through it fast. The redesign broke habits they had built over years. For two weeks after launch they were the loudest voice in the building.
A two-week learning curve for 18% of advisors vs. 11 minutes saved on every single review by the other 82%. The math wasn't close.
I built a toggle back to the old layout and left it in place for 60 days, so senior advisors could switch back while they learned the new screen at their own pace. After 60 days, 71% had moved across on their own. We removed the old layout in the third release and heard nothing further. When you change how an expert works, give them a way across rather than a drop.
Returns at the top, allocation in the middle, risk at the bottom.
This came from watching people work. Advisors read a portfolio from the top down. Returns tell them what happened, allocation tells them why, risk tells them what it means. The screen follows that order. Across 24 timed sessions, not one advisor read them in a different sequence.
The tax forecast sits on the same screen, not behind a tab.
Tax was the number people most often had to check against something else. It needed to sit next to returns rather than a click away. It is a panel on the same screen, closed by default for advisors who want less on screen and open for those who want it.
The feature people liked most after launch was a small warning that appears when a portfolio's stated allocation does not match what it actually holds, usually because a company action had not fully come through in the data. Before the redesign advisors caught these by hand maybe 60% of the time. With the flag they catch all of them, and nobody has to remember to look. A whole category of quiet mistakes disappeared.
I ran the testing myself, comparing the new single screen against the old sections across the three regions. Use of the main features, opening up returns, rebalancing allocation, and modelling tax, rose 31% in the group on the new design. The summary screen some stakeholders had asked for was settled by the data: where we shipped it, people used it 84% less than the main screen.
I built a set of reusable parts for this kind of work: portfolio cards, the pattern for opening a number up, the disagreement states, tax input fields. They live in a documented Figma library mapped to the code. The effect showed up in the build. Questions from engineers each sprint dropped from about 8 to 3, and later work on the risk section and client reports moved faster because nobody was reinventing the same pieces.
Review time fell from 25 to 14 minutes, a drop of 44%. Measured the same way as before the redesign, across 30 reviews in the same three regions. The result held in all three, which suggests the gain came from the design rather than from one office.
Use of the main dashboard rose 31%, measured by testing across the three regions. The summary screen we tested alongside it saw 84% less use than the main screen, which ended a feature request before it reached everyone.
Questions from engineers dropped from 8 to 3 a sprint once the documented library shipped, and the share of work sent back at design review fell from about 22% to about 7%.
Eleven minutes a review does not sound like much on its own. Across the whole user base it looks different:
(25 − 14) min × 50,000 portfolios a month = 550,000 minutes, or about 9,167 advisor hours a month
At roughly ₹1,500 an hour for advisor time, an industry figure published in 2023, that is about ₹1.37 Cr a month in advisor time recovered. The point of the number is not precision. It turns a design fix into something the executive team can defend against their own budget.
"The redesign didn't make the analytics better. It made the platform finally match the way advisors actually work. That's a far harder problem — and a far bigger payoff."
— Product Manager, internal launch retro14 minutes is good, and the spread underneath it is interesting. The fastest quarter of advisors are at 10 to 11 minutes. The slowest quarter are at 16 to 18. Almost all of that gap is now the writing of the note the client actually reads. Experienced advisors write it quickly. Newer ones labour over it.
My theory: an AI-drafted first version of that note, which the advisor then edits and approves, would take 4 to 5 minutes off the slowest quarter and pull everyone closer to the target. The tracking is already there, so we know what advisors keep, change, and throw away from any draft. The risk is that AI-written text in regulated advice needs careful limits, something I had already worked through in detail at Goldman Sachs.
TCS work runs on visible limits. The client sets the release schedule, the software is in use every day and cannot go down, and designs either land inside the sprint or they do not ship. The redesign had to hold up to the advisors using it, the bank's product team, and TCS engineering leadership at the same time.
Cutting scope was not an option, because half a unified screen is a worse layout than four honest sections. Cutting quality would have cost the bank's confidence in TCS. So the schedule moved. The screen shipped across two sprint cycles, with the old layout kept alongside it to absorb the disruption for senior advisors.
"In a B2B SaaS engagement with a live user base, the constraint isn't creative freedom. It's the discipline to ship the change advisors will actually adopt without breaking the workflow that pays the bills."
Conclusion
When software is arranged the way people actually work, the saving is not a few percent. Here it was 44%, on every advisor, every portfolio, every month.
The unified portfolio canvas, reusable component patterns, and A/B-validated decision framework remain in production use across the bank's wealth analytics platform.
Glad we could cross paths.
Out of anywhere you could be, you're here.
Tata Consultancy Services
I can measure a problem instead of describing it
Rather than call the software cluttered, I recorded 24 reviews with a stopwatch and separated thinking time from hunting time. That turned a vague complaint into a number the business could act on.
9 min 12 sec of every review was navigation, not analysis
I can pick the harder fix when the cheap one will not work
A search bar and a summary screen were both quicker to build. Neither made two numbers agree, which was the actual bottleneck, so I argued for rebuilding onto one screen.
Review time fell 44%, from 25 minutes to 14
I can take a decision that upsets the most powerful users
The redesign broke the habits of the top 18% of advisors, who bring in 40% of revenue. I designed for the majority doing most of the volume, and built a toggle back to the old layout so the fastest advisors could move at their own pace.
71% of senior advisors switched over voluntarily within 60 days
I let evidence settle feature arguments
Stakeholders wanted a summary screen. Instead of arguing, I shipped it as a test alongside the main screen and watched what people actually used.
84% less use than the main screen, so it was dropped
I build things that keep paying after I leave
I documented reusable parts with their behaviour and awkward cases written down, so engineers stopped having to ask the same questions every sprint.
Engineer questions down from 8 to 3 a sprint
Details in this case study are covered by an NDA and have been generalised.