Pershing X is BNY Mellon's fintech division, built to modernize how financial advisors work. They saw an opportunity to rebuild the advisor experience from the ground up and set out to create a new platform. The result was Wove, a first-of-its-kind platform that consolidated 20+ applications into a single connected experience, launched publicly at INSITE 2023 to immediate industry recognition.
My involvement began during the vision phase, contributing to the initial screens and strategy work that helped win the account. Over the 16 months that followed, I worked across multiple tracks of the engagement. I designed new advisor workflows, reworked outdated ones, established design patterns that shaped how the entire team approached information hierarchy, and shaped how existing applications could be brought into a unified experience.
I owned the design system as the only designer on the engagement with a systems thinking background. Every team built from that foundation, and final approval on what entered the system was mine. That kept parallel workstreams visually and structurally coherent and ensured the system could scale beyond its initial deployment.
On the engineering side, I worked closely with engineers not just on feasibility but on shared architecture decisions. The token structure for light and dark mode theming was built in close collaboration with how engineering organized their component library, making theming a jointly owned decision rather than a design handoff. For data-heavy surfaces like the dashboard, trading, and portfolio workflows, I designed interaction states in direct response to engineering constraints, making sure loading patterns, empty states, and error states weren't overlooked across a project moving at this pace.
The problemFinancial advisors were operating across a fragmented landscape of internal tools and third-party applications that didn't talk to each other. Every task required switching between systems, manually re-entering the same data in multiple places, and piecing together a picture of each client from information scattered across platforms. The industry had a name for it. The swivel chair effect.
The opportunityPershing X's decision was to build something new entirely. A unified platform that would integrate internal and third-party applications under a single experience, with data flowing across them rather than being duplicated by hand. That required going back to the workflows advisors had been using for decades, understanding what needed to be rebuilt entirely and what could be improved without disrupting the habits advisors had built around them.
Added complexityPershing X also had a longer-term vision for the platform: a white label product that could be stripped of BNY-specific branding and offered to other financial institutions as a ready-made advisory platform for their own advisors. Every component and workflow had to be designed with that flexibility built in, not just optimized for one institution.
The vision phase was an opportunity to define what the platform could be. We framed our approach around a day in the life of a financial advisor, with four pillars driving the thinking:
- — A world-class user experience
- — Seamless data flow across internal and third-party applications
- — Data surfaced in context when advisors needed it
- — A system scalable enough to support future growth
The pitch included an interactive vision prototype alongside static screens showing key surfaces: a dashboard, trading, portfolio, financial planning, and market monitoring. Seeing those surfaces working together made the vision tangible in a way a static presentation couldn't. Pershing X selected Publicis Sapient, and the prototype gave the work a concrete foundation to build from.
The first four weeks after winning the account were dedicated to strategic discovery. Working directly with Ainslie Simmonds, President of Pershing X, and their global head of design and UX, we mapped the full scope of what the platform needed to be.
Over 25 interviews with financial advisors followed, surfacing unmet needs, daily friction points, and workflow gaps the existing tools had never addressed. From those interviews came detailed personas and needs analyses, along with a current-state journey map that made the pain points visible and gave the team a shared understanding of what we were designing against.
Mapping the full scope of the platform into a coherent structure required the same rigor as designing each individual workflow within it.
Context-Aware NavigationEvery navigation decision was shaped through detailed conversations with advisors about how they actually worked and where the platform could make the biggest difference. At its most basic, the global navigation provided a consistent starting point across the platform, with top-level access to Clients, Services, Investments, and Practice. Whether working inside a client record, drilling into an individual account, or reviewing a household group, the navigation adapted to reflect the work being done at that level.
The context-specific side navigation operated at a different level of specificity, providing granular views, actions, and workflows tailored to exactly where the advisor was. For advisors managing complex workflows across dozens of clients and accounts, having the right options in the right place wasn't a nice to have. It was the difference between a tool that supported their work and one that got in the way of it.
Even search adapted, pulling results across accounts, groups, clients, advisors, and investments in a single unified view, scoped by the active workflow context.
No surface required more deliberation than the dashboard. Every element on it had to justify its place. Advisors needed a home screen that oriented their day, surfaced workflows requiring their attention, and gave them the ability to kick off their most common tasks without leaving the home screen. Each round of usability testing kept those decisions honest, pushing the experience closer to something advisors could act from rather than just read.
From the beginning, the measure of success was simple. The platform had to disappear into their workflow so completely that advisors could focus on their clients instead of their tools.
Building the FoundationIn the opening weeks of the engagement, the priority was getting a shared foundation in front of every team as early as possible. Every team across every workstream built from that foundation, bringing new component requests to me when gaps arose. Not everything made it in. Each request required evaluating whether the component would appear across multiple workflows and contexts, whether an existing component could solve it through a variant, or whether the need was specific enough to an edge case that it had no place in a shared library. That discipline kept the system focused and coherent as the platform scaled.
Throughout the engagement, the token structure was built in close collaboration with engineering, making theming a jointly owned decision rather than a design handoff.
Evolving Without BreakingOver time those components were continuously refined and strengthened, so that by the time final branding was ready the system was solid enough that the migration could focus entirely on the visual language rather than revisiting structural decisions that had already been resolved. A second designer joined and the two of us updated the system in place. Not a rebuild. Every token, variable, and component was updated to reflect the new visual language without invalidating the work teams had already built on top of it, with the goal of disrupting active workstreams as little as possible. Updating a live system that teams are actively building from requires a level of care that building from scratch doesn't.
Theming Without CompromiseWith the goal of giving advisors the ability to work in whichever visual environment suited them best, light and dark modes were built into the system during the refinement phase. Both modes used the same components, meaning there was no duplication to manage and no risk of the two drifting apart over time.
Built to Scale Beyond BNYPershing X's longer-term business vision required the system to be built with more than the current deployment in mind. The plan was to launch under their own branding, build recognition in the market, and eventually offer the platform to other financial institutions as a white label product. That future required deliberate decisions during the build itself, specifically around component naming conventions and token structure, so the system could support brand-agnostic deployment when the time came without needing to be restructured from the ground up.
Portfolio Construction was one of the most complex workflows on the platform. Advisors needed to evaluate investment models, build and customize portfolios, and manage allocations across multiple client accounts, tasks that had previously required moving between several disconnected tools.
Advisors had been managing portfolio construction inside a modal for years. Working within the constraints of a small overlay that gave them no room to think, compare, or act with confidence. During the wireframe phase I set out to find a fundamentally better solution.
A side drawer was the first direction I explored, offering more room while keeping the workflow accessible from within the platform. In practice it still divided the screen, leaving advisors working in a narrow panel that couldn't support the complexity of the task. A bottom drawer was the strongest exploration, taking over more of the viewport. I added a grey overlay behind it to neutralize the content above and give the workflow the focus it needed. But no amount of visual treatment could compensate for the lack of space.
Portfolio construction requires sustained focus, multiple data points visible simultaneously, and the space to compare and decide. These are decisions being made on behalf of clients with real financial stakes. The workspace needed to reflect the gravity of what happens inside it.
The real question the exploration surfaced wasn't just about Portfolio Construction. It was about how the platform should treat information based on its complexity and the weight of the decisions being made inside it. That thinking produced a clear framework:
- — Full page for complex, high-stakes workflows requiring sustained focus
- — Drawers for secondary interactions and lower-priority components where limited space was workable
- — Modals for simple confirmations and quick actions only
Once that framework was in place, it gave every designer on the team a shared language for how to treat information, removing ambiguity from decisions that would have otherwise been made inconsistently across workstreams.
Wove debuted at INSITE 2023 to immediate industry attention, with press coverage positioning it as a signal that BNY Mellon Pershing was making a credible move from custodian to fintech player. At the launch, Ainslie Simmonds, President of Pershing X, spoke to the scale of what had been solved and the appetite the industry had for it.
The swivel chair effect that had defined how advisors worked for years was finally gone. The platform went live with 20+ workflows, each chosen deliberately through extensive conversations with Pershing X and advisors to identify what would have the greatest impact at launch. Each one connected to the same underlying data model and design language, so that for the first time data followed advisors as they moved through the platform. No re-entering information. No switching contexts. No piecing together a picture that should have always been whole.
The results reflected the scale of what was built.
- MVP in 10 months across a 16-month engagement
- 20+ workflows unified into a single connected experience
- 1,200+ fields in the existing account setup system mapped and reduced to 250, a 60%+ reduction in account setup burden
- 11 advisor journeys redesigned across the EMEA rollout, reaching over 80% of Pershing's client base
- BNY Mellon became a top 5 new client for Publicis Sapient in 2022 across all industries
Global Finance — The Innovators 2024World's Best Innovations Award Winner, June 2024
Celent Model Wealth Manager AwardStreamlining Advisor Workflows, March 2024
Banking Tech AwardsBest Use of Tech in Private Banking/Wealth Management, 2024
Datos Insights Wealth Management Impact AwardTechnology Transformation, November 2023
