Case study
Annual Client Acct. Fee Review
Designed a scalable request lifecycle system for annual fee review across financial advisors and home office teams.
TL;DR
Modernizing an annual fee review workflow for financial advisors and home office
As advisor operations and client volume continued to grow, Northwestern Mutual needed to replace a legacy PowerBI-based workflow used during annual fee season, where advisors submitted fee exemption requests and home office reviewed exceptions across large volumes of client accounts.
As the sole Product Designer, I redesigned the experience within NM Connect, introducing grouped requests, structured review process, and lifecycle management to support a more efficient, traceable, and scalable fee review process.
01
Business context
A critical annual process supporting rapidly growing advisor and client volume.
Each year during annual fee season, Northwestern Mutual financial advisors review a large volume of client accounts and submit requests to either waive annual fees or pay fees on behalf of clients. The existing workflow relied on PowerBI and increasingly struggled to support growing operational complexity as the business scaled.
As Northwestern Mutual consolidated company tools into NM Connect, the annual fee review process was identified as an opportunity for redesign, transforming a legacy workflow into a more scalable experience integrated within the broader ecosystem.
Business drivers
01
Modernize and consolidate
Replace legacy PowerBI with an integrated tool inside NM Connect.
02
Support growing business scale
Enable the workflow to scale alongside increasing advisor & review volume.
03
Improve review reliability
Provide a more structured tool and process across multiple teams.
Before & after
Legacy PowerBI
The prior workflow was report-centered, which left request handling, ownership, and exception tracking outside the core experience.
New NM Connect workspace
The redesigned experience moved the review process into a role-aware operational workspace with submission, lifecycle, and review in one place.
02
Early proposal
Framing a workflow hypothesis.
After reviewing the existing PowerBI workflow with the Business Analyst and understanding the operational rules behind annual fee requests, I began by quickly proposing a rough product structure and foundational interaction model.
At this stage, I focused on creating an operationally workable system that could be validated directly with advisors and home office reviewers.
Homepage structure
The first pass organized the workflow around account review, submission access, and the operational actions advisors needed during fee season.
These early concepts were intentionally rough, serving as conversation tools for various discussions, engineering alignment, and user validation. They also helped surface workflow patterns and operational needs that were not visible in the original requirements.
03
User validation
Understanding how requests actually move through the organization.
After creating an early proposal, I conducted 8 user interviews to validate assumptions and understand how requests were actually managed across multiple teams.
Rather than focusing only on screens, the goal was to understand how users processed large volumes of accounts, how review coordination worked operationally, and where existing experience consistently broke down.
Financial advisors
5
Home office reviewers
3
Interview guide
The script kept sessions structured and focused.
Synthesis notes
Interview notes were grouped to identify recurring themes.
Research findings
Several patterns emerged consistently across interviews and workflow reviews. One important insight was that users were not processing requests individually. Advisors, field teams, and reviewers were often managing large batches of accounts simultaneously, requiring workflows optimized for bulk coordination rather than isolated submissions.
The research also revealed that request workflows extended far beyond initial submission. Requests were frequently edited, reopened, resubmitted, canceled, or coordinated across multiple reviewers — scenarios that the existing PowerBI workflow handled poorly through manual workarounds.
01
Volume
Bulk processing was the norm
Advisors often reviewed 100-500+ accounts in a session, making efficient selection, submission, and tracking central to the system.
02
Request clarity
Context shaped review quality
Reviewers relied heavily on advisor comments. Missing context led to returned requests, delays, and slower approvals.
03
Coordination
Review collisions happened
Multiple reviewers could enter the same request at the same time, creating confusion, overwriting risk, and a need for ownership indicators.
04
State changes
Lifecycle went beyond submission
Requests could be returned, updated, reopened, resubmitted, or canceled, but the legacy workflow did not support the full lifecycle cleanly.
04
Final design
Designing for how advisors and home office teams actually work.
Research highlighted three recurring needs: supporting batch operations, improving review coordination, and managing requests beyond submission. The final product addressed these needs through three dedicated workspaces aligned with how advisors and Home Office teams participated in the process.
Advisor workspace
High-volume account review without losing table context.
The Advisor Workspace allowed users to review accounts, create requests, and manage request groups from the same operational surface. A persistent side panel reduced navigation and supported high-volume account management during fee season.
Submissions workspace
Submission became a lifecycle workspace instead of an endpoint.
Separating submissions from account review created a dedicated workspace for tracking request progress, managing request changes, and revisiting previous decisions throughout the review lifecycle.
Home office review
Structured review context with ownership visibility.
The Home office experience brought request context, review actions, lifecycle history, and ownership visibility into one environment. Ownership and locking reduced reviewer conflicts while keeping the broader review team informed.
Edge cases
Beyond the Core Workflow.
Annual fee review rarely follows a single happy path. In addition to request creation and review, the final design supported a range of scenarios including request editing, cancellation, resubmission, and reopening reviewed requests.
These scenarios helped ensure the system could support real annual fee operations beyond the primary submission flow.
05
Impact
Built a scalable fee review system inside NM Connect.
The redesigned experience supports annual fee review operations across 8,000+ advisors and $400B+ AUM, introducing structured lifecycle management, review ownership, and grouped request handling within a unified operational system.
Based on business projections, the new experience is expected to:
35%
Reduced request processing time
Expected reduction in request processing time.
50%
Fewer returned requests
Reduction in returned requests caused by incomplete submission.
Scale
Expanded operational capacity
Improves capacity as advisor and client volume continues to grow.