Northern Trust's Investment Outsourcing Operations ran reactive, ad-hoc, and manual. Teams stitched data together by hand across disconnected systems, and the firm was losing deals to competitors like SEI and STP, who offered advanced workflow dashboards. The fractured data architecture made even simple questions slow to answer.
Across a four-phase design-thinking process I ran 11 interviews with employees in North America and EMEA plus 6 external customer interviews. Stakeholder mapping surfaced five critical themes: data availability, oversight perception, manual processing cost, account-health visibility, and speed. Those themes pointed to three integrated dashboards — account health, a real-time trade dashboard, and reconciliation tracking — with customizable widgets, configurable alerts, and the ability to respond to issues without leaving the system.
Deep research turned a reactive operation into one with real-time oversight, giving the team a competitive answer to the dashboards it had been losing deals to — consistent with the design-thinking-led process that has driven an average 50% lift in CSAT across my engagements.