Goldman Sachs set out to attract more Financial Advisors by modernizing how Separately Managed Accounts are onboarded and managed. While SMAs offer customization and flexibility, they introduce operational complexity that discourages adoption. Many workflows remained fragmented across paper, email, custodians, and internal teams. The mandate was not just to design pages, but to connect a distributed process into a scalable digital system that could expand into future offerings.

Initial concepts centered on performance visibility and portfolio storytelling. Through direct advisor interviews and workflow observation, it became clear that performance data was not the bottleneck. Advisors already had access to metrics elsewhere. What they lacked was operational clarity. Account status updates were manually tracked across inboxes, phone calls, and spreadsheets. The real opportunity was reducing uncertainty, not increasing analytics.

I redirected the experience toward a unified account event tracker embedded within a redesigned Accounts Overview. This reframed the portal from a reporting tool into an operational control surface. Key system level information surfaced included account name, custodian number, AUM, strategy, account open date, and most importantly, latest account event. Advisors could now see where an account stood in the lifecycle without chasing multiple parties.

The largest challenge was stakeholder misalignment around which events mattered. The advisor, Goldman operations, custodians, and end clients each influenced the lifecycle. To resolve this, I developed and facilitated journey mapping workshops focused on the full lifecycle from prospect to active funded account. By visualizing the handoffs between institutions, we clarified event definitions and reduced ambiguity across teams. This alignment directly shaped the tracker architecture.

Usability validation focused on three areas:

• Whether advisors could quickly determine account status without additional context
• Whether surfaced data reduced follow up communication
• Whether the event model matched real world expectations

The result was a streamlined operational layer that reduced manual tracking and repositioned the Advisor Portal as infrastructure rather than marketing collateral. More importantly, it established a scalable system foundation that could support additional strategies beyond SMAs.