Project

Nest Wealth - Custodial Systems and Processes

Product Design
AI Strategy
Leadership & Growth
[team] image of individual team member

My role:
Senior Product Designer — Nest Wealth (2019–2021)

My Role

As the lead designer and manager on this project, I was responsible for:

    • Team leadership — collaborating with a UX partner (Nest UX) to bring additional research capacity, and managing the synthesis work with my team
    • Roadmap translation — converting findings into a prioritized client touchpoint roadmap that aligned product, sales, and conference milestones
    • Hiring — concurrently building out the UX function to ensure this type of embedded discovery and design became a repeatable practice
    Designing the discovery framework — defining objectives, target audience criteria, session structure, and the question bank
  • Stakeholder alignment — coordinating with Relationship Managers (RMs) and internal product leads to identify and access the right client participants
  • Facilitation — running virtual discovery sessions with PM and IB firms (8 sessions total across 7 firms)

Custodial Admin - CompassX

Partnered with National Bank, the team at Nest Wealth embarked on the process of redesigning their internal Custodial platform.

The Financial Ecosystem

National Bank plays a critical role in the wealth management ecosystem by providing robust custodial and brokerage infrastructure that enables boutique firms to operate at scale without the burden of building complex back-office capabilities. Through its comprehensive custodial services, including custody, clearing and settlement, account statement production, tax reporting, and registered plan administration, it ensures that firms can deliver accurate, compliant, and seamless experiences to their clients. Capabilities such as new account onboarding, transfer management, corporate actions, and mutual fund processing further reduce operational friction, allowing advisors to focus on client relationships and portfolio strategy rather than administrative overhead.

Beyond core custody, National Bank’s investment fund and prime brokerage services extend significant leverage to boutique wealth managers. With a full-service offering in a regulated SRO environment, firms gain access to multi-asset class clearing, margin financing, and sophisticated reporting across both public funds and private pools. This infrastructure not only enhances operational efficiency and transparency but also enables smaller firms to compete with larger institutions—offering institutional-grade services, faster execution, and more diverse investment opportunities to their clients.

Key Services

Custodial Services

  • Custody, clearing and settlement
  • Account statement production and tax reporting
  • New accounts and transfer management
  • Registered plan administration
  • Corporate actions and entitlements administration
  • Mutual fund processing

Investment Fund and Prime Brokerage Services

  • Full prime brokerage and custodian service offering in an SRO environment
  • Public funds and private pools
  • Margin financing
  • Reporting
  • Multi-asset class clearing

Why Nest Wealth?

National Bank of Canada partnered with Nest Wealth to combine institutional-grade custody and brokerage infrastructure with a modern, scalable digital investing platform. This allowed the bank to accelerate digital transformation and better serve independent advisors and emerging investor segments without building everything in-house. In turn, Nest Wealth gained distribution, regulatory backing, and access to a broad network of boutique wealth firms.

The Problem

NBIN's existing platform, Compass, had grown organically over many years. Anecdotal feedback suggested users were frustrated, but the product team lacked structured evidence to know what to fix, for whom, and in what order. Leadership needed a research-backed foundation to justify roadmap decisions, especially ahead of a major conference reveal and a phased feature rollout.
The core questions were:

  • What does a day in the life actually look like across the different user roles we serve?
  • Where are the biggest friction points in administrative workflows?
  • Which platform features drive the most and least value?
  • How do our clients' organizational structures map to the user types we've assumed?

Process and Role

Phase One
  • Collaborated with National Bank Product team to outline goals and objectives
  • Designed the discovery framework to structure and guide research
  • Facilitated client sessions to uncover needs, pain points, and opportunities
  • Led the synthesis of findings into clear, actionable insights
  • Translated insights into a prioritized CX product roadmap aligned to business impact
  • Prepared internal Nest Wealth team for Phase Two

The following are screenshots from our collaborative sessions:

Key Results

  • Provided the first structured, qualitative evidence base for Compass X product decisions
  • Directly influenced the prioritization of administrative CX features for the v1 and v2 releases
  • Established a repeatable discovery model that the team could use for future research cycles
  • Built internal confidence among leadership that UX was embedded in — not bolted onto — the product development process
  • Supported the case for expanding the UX team, resulting in a hiring plan I led to bring dedicated research capability in-house

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    Reflections

    This project reinforced that discovery, when done well, is a strategic lever. It's not just a passive research exercise. By designing a rigorous, non-leading question framework, we moved beyond surface-level opinions and uncovered real behavioural patterns, validating key assumptions that directly shaped the product direction. The outcome was a clearly prioritized CX roadmap that targeted the highest-friction journeys, with the potential to reduce.

    Leading this across internal stakeholders, external clients, and a partner agency required tight alignment and deliberate trust-building. I established a structured cadence for communication and synthesis, ensuring insights were continuously translated into decisions rather than sitting in decks. If I were to run this today, I would expand the participant pool beyond six sessions to increase statistical confidence and include more diversity across firm size and geography, strengthening edge-case validation and ensuring the solution scales effectively across different segments.