Constructing a whole new portfolio.
When Fidelity was ready to reimagine mobile finance, they called on us to help.
Alongside its chief rivals Schwab and Vanguard, Fidelity is one of the pillars of the American financial services sector. Long reputed for its financial prudence and excellent advisory practice, it struggled in recent years to realize its full potential in a market increasingly crowded with nimble, tech savvy challengers setting new standards of digital user experience and driving heretofore lucrative brokerage and advisory fees down to almost nothing. Responding to new pricing pressure wouldn't be enough; to stay ahead and attract and retain the Gen X and Millennial customers needed to ensure its future prosperity, it needed to drastically rethink its approach to customer-facing digital experiences and specifically its mobile app portfolio. After a competitive search for the right partner, Livefront—together with our partners at Zeus Jones—beat out several top management consultancies for the opportunity to help Fidelity navigate this unfamiliar new landscape and define a vision for its digital future.
Doing our due diligence.
Priority number one for us was getting our bearings in the problem space and quickly building fluency in Fidelity's business, its customers' needs, and the trends and forces shaping the broader fintech landscape. We worked with our friends at Zeus Jones, a Minneapolis-based strategy agency, to recruit and activate a panel of finance experts from around the country, representing a diverse mix of perspectives, practice areas, and lived experience, and together giving us a collective 360º view of the problem space. We used this group's combined insight to answer some of our most pressing questions and spark some new ones, keep ourselves and our clients honest, and co-create product concepts and prototypes that fed back into our work with partners and stakeholders within Fidelity.
Right-sizing the product lineup.
For years, Fidelity had wrestled with questions about the basic composition of its mobile app ecosystem: one general mobile app, or several specialized ones? If more than one, where should the lines be drawn and how many is too many? How should Fidelity think about new product and feature experimentation within that ecosystem, and how should that be reflected in the org chart?
To bring order to the mess, we did a deep dive on app ecosystem composition among leading (and lagging) companies across verticals to highlight the benefits and risks of different approaches through the lens of real-world examples. In partnership with Fidelity executives representing many different functions and reporting chains, we then cross-referenced these findings against the goals and opportunities our research identified to once and for all converge on a path forward that sustainably served what the business was trying to accomplish for its customers.
Visualizing the vision.
Instead of presenting the hypotheses we came to along the way as bullet points or abstract value proposition, we took the time to actually flesh them out in just enough fidelity to get a strong, intuitive signal from our panel on whether or not they were worth pursuing. Taking this "show, don't tell" approach and projecting it through the lens of external, impartial feedback enabled us to move quickly, bring stakeholders along with minimal "case building," and ultimately arrive at a stronger and more vivid long-term vision.
Our contributions.
Strategy & Research
- Product Strategy & Vision
- User Research
- Concepting & Prototyping
Product Design
- Native Mobile Design