Northern Trust has served clients with wealth management and investment services for over 130+ years. With a footprint that covers the United States and 22 international locations, today they provide financial services to retail banking clients, high net-worth individuals and families, and corporate institutions, managing over a trillion dollars in assets.
Goals:
• Migrate clients to a new login experience and technology leveraging the Okta (Identity-As-A-Service) platform.
• Introduce new multi-factor authentication options for clients to enroll in and authenticate with.
Challenges:
A core challenge for this project was navigating change management and the weight of moving off of a homegrown solution onto a supported third-party platform.
Prior to my joining the organization, a Chicago research and design firm was contracted to perform industry research around security and authentication in finance. They also conducted client and internal research to better understand the existing landscape as it pertains to banking security for this organization.
Below is a quote from the research report that really stuck out to me:
"Security and convenience don't need to be tensions of each other. Clients deserve both."
Not uncommon, security is a necessary evil that many companies think of from a technical perspective but not a human-centric perspective.
Northerntrust.com currently uses a slide-out panel for client login, leveraging homegrown identity logic. This experience is owned by Corporate Marketing, and any enhancements are restricted to their roadmap and bandwidth. As part of this migration to a new login experience using Okta, I created an intermediary landing page. An experience that would sit between the company website and client passports (apps). I spent quite some time working with my product manager and stakeholders to gain alignment on this direction; also mapping out the new login experience and what that would mean for clients from a change management perspective.
Benefits:
The second phase of this project involves introducing updated multi-factor authentication functionality to clients. Note: I explored concepts for this which uses Okta's MFA technology and options. However, I departed Northern before phase 2 development began. To support this, I completed an audit of Okta's MFA offerings and created 'archetypes' that could be leveraged demonstrate the enrollment and authentication process. I storyboarded and prototyped this for ideation and discussion purposes.
My primary responsibilities as the Senior Product Designer on the project involved guiding the user experience for the login and multi-factor authentication implementation; I also supported engineering, and worked with my product manager to define requirements and engage the numerous stakeholders that would be impacted. Some aspects of my role extended beyond your typical 'core' design duties as well. Below is a list of my contributions: