Problem Statement

Investors need easy and early access to the type of investment options available, with an overview of information on sustainable assets such as pictures, descriptions, historic performance, asset manager info, etc. 
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Sustainable real assets investments are very exclusive, and asset managers are selective about who can access this asset information. We need to find a balance between the type and amount of information we can provide to investors before potentially giving an indicative offer, while ensuring asset managers feel comfortable with sharing.

Challenges

• Asset card with high-level information, marketing asset image, status, and CTA for Dealroom access request.
• A page to display all the asset card information and more detailed information about the asset and asset managers.
• Investment widget to be displayed In the asset deal room
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Design Process

We used an adaptation of the Design Thinking approach to solve this problem. We followed the below process:

Empathize

In this project, this step was crucial. We identified at least 4 stakeholders who asked for specifications that would impact the overall user flow and, consequently, the UX process.
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The first stakeholder was the asset holders. Given the nature of these types of investment opportunities and their secretive and reserved nature, they wanted to review any access request before providing information about the asset.
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The second stakeholder was Realport's regulatory partners, who asked for deep information to conduct Know Your Customer (KYC), Customer due diligence (CDD), and anti-money laundering (AML), among others.
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The third stakeholder was the institutional investors. We assumed they wanted fast and quick access to investment opportunities to evaluate the quality and performance of the assets for potential selling or investment execution.
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The fourth stakeholder was the actual company goals. All the requests and specifications from the above parties needed to align with the company's vision and business goal of providing easy and fast access to sustainable real assets investments.

Define Phase

After identifying the needs of the involved parties, we designed the following high-level user flow steps:

• Basic registration (needed to access asset overview info)
• Asset overview (in the form of an asset card that provides high-level information about investment opportunities)
• Deal-room access/KYC (process needed to be completed to access the asset deal room)
• Dealroom
• Investment process
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Indentation

Asset Card

For the asset card, it was important to define the right set of data to be displayed and find a way to allow for quick comparison between asset cards. 
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We iterated through different card information structures to show high-level information such as asset name, asset location, past performance, investment conditions, and status.

After a period of testing and validating the data to be shown with asset managers and potential investors, we concluded that structuring the asset card information in a flexible way, allowing different sets of information based on the inputs provided for each asset, was the best approach.

We chose to support high-level information items with the use of icon graphics that help easily identify sets of information and facilitate comparison between asset cards.

Additionally, we needed to show the status of the asset based on the stage of the historical investment stage. For this, we implemented a color code system to reflect each status stage.

Dealroom page

The goal of the deal room is to facilitate all the information needed to convince investors to invest and initiate the KYC process. We divided the Dealroom page into three sections: High-level information, Investment widget, and Deep information.

We initially focused on the top section, where, based on business goals, we decided to combine high-level information with the investment widget. We made several iterations of this section with the same structure but different visual styles, all in line with Realport's design language and guidelines.

For the deep information section, we split the content into three tabs: Highlight, Exposé, and Description. In the Highlight tab, we displayed a digested overview of the overall asset information related to the asset manager, past performance and projections, and links to important documentation. In the Exposé tab, we provided access to a detailed PDF document with all the asset information. In the Description tab, we showed an image slider with pictures of the asset supported by a marketing-focused description.

Solution

Project learnings

This project was challenging in terms of testing due to the early stage of product development. We could only test the user flows through potential investors' demo sections and document any feedback they provided throughout the process.
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After a period of iterations and testing, the team concluded that we were asking too much from the users with very little reward. Users needed to make a basic registration to access high-level information, then request Dealroom access, which needed to be approved by asset owners. They also had to go through an extensive KYC process before gaining access to a specific asset's Dealroom.
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Because of the reasons described above, the team decided to find a way to display as much information as possible before initiating any registration process.