Simplifying financial compliance for 1.8 million clients

Charles Schwab offers banking, investing, wealth management, and other financial services to 1.8 million retail and institutional clients around the world.

The challenge

Charles Schwab needed to revamp its internal compliance solution, SchwabCT, with a user-focused, data-driven approach.

Clients use the tool to automate highly manual, time-consuming tasks related to monitoring employee trading activity and to ultimately uphold their organization’s code of ethics. However, the legacy platform was slow and cumbersome, with over 550 separate screens for users to navigate through, creating workflow bottlenecks for both clients and Schwab employees.

The solution

To gain a deeper understanding of Charles Schwab’s compliance solution and its users’ pain points, Codal kicked off the project with a rigorous Discovery phase.

We analyzed the underlying technology to identify outdated software that could use modernization. And because our team prioritizes the end-user so heavily, we conducted a slew of user interviews and surveys, extending our scope from prospective clients to Schwab employees.

From our technical audit, research, and interviews, Codal’s design team collected a wealth of both qualitative and quantitative data regarding the issues and opportunities of SchwabCT, then triaged them accordingly.

Iterative UX design and user feedback to enhance SchwabCT functionality

Through a series of design sprints, our team built prototypes for the platform’s new user experience. Then, diving deeper into UX research, Codal attended a national Charles Schwab compliance conference to demonstrate the early prototypes and collect feedback from real users of the web application.

From this feedback, we were able to transform common user expectations and frustrations into strategic platform updates, while continuing to address the web application’s bedrock issues. We also learned about desired functionalities that were completely missing from the platform, which we then included in our next round of prototyping and testing.

The result

Codal transformed the outdated, complex technology into an extremely intuitive and aesthetically-pleasing web application.

Once the project was finished, we had simplified SchwabCT by revamping the platform’s information architecture, consolidating over 550 separate screens into a mere 7 templates. This tool continues to help organizations grow by streamlining financial compliance via workflow automation and creative data visualization—all wrapped up in a seamless end-to-end user experience.