Designing Seamless Reporting & Document Management for Financial Advisors

Project Context & Business Goals

The Goals Driven Wealth Management (GDWM) platform is a cornerstone application at Northern Trust, designed to equip financial advisors with tools to manage complex client relationships. Advisors rely on GDWM to guide clients through wealth planning conversations, such as reviewing family structures, assessing risk, modeling long-term goals, and preparing financial reports. In these contexts, advisors are often sitting across from high-net-worth clients, where every minute of the meeting is valuable and every system interaction must be seamless.

Yet despite the platform’s critical role, two workflows were consistently slowing advisors down and undermining confidence in client interactions.

Document Access: Advisors frequently needed to reference supporting materials, such as strategy brochures, practice slides, or client-specific files stored in SharePoint. But these files were not accessible directly from GDWM. Advisors were forced to leave the platform, search through SharePoint folders, or even pull files from email. This constant context switching disrupted the flow of meetings and, in some cases, left advisors fumbling in front of clients.

Report Generation: Advisors also depended on GDWM for generating client reports. These reports consolidated data from multiple modules of the platform including assets, allocations, goals, and risk analysis into a polished deliverable that could be shared digitally or printed. The existing reporting workflow, however, was cumbersome and incomplete. Advisors struggled to choose relevant sections, attach external documents, and reliably preview what the final report would look like. Sharing was even more problematic. Most advisors defaulted to email, a method that was discouraged for compliance reasons and prone to technical errors.

For advisors, the inefficiencies were costly in both time and credibility. For Northern Trust, the risks were equally significant: lower adoption of GDWM, inconsistent quality in client-facing outputs, and unnecessary compliance exposure.

The opportunity was clear: if we could redesign Resources (document access) and Reporting (report generation) into one seamless, integrated system, advisors would save time, reduce errors, and enter client meetings with greater confidence. For the business, this meant higher platform adoption, fewer support calls, and a strengthened reputation for delivering operational excellence at scale.