RBC: Sponsor portal
The Project:
Sponsor Portal is an B2B facing tool that RBC has created for different companies to give investment plans to their employees. The software allows the company admin to assign their employees to different plans and manage their contributions. When the time comes that the employee is no longer part of the company and not receiving contributions from their employer, the company admin (often referred to as the sponsor) can terminate them from their plan(s).
It is important to note that there are 2 key players to be identified in this member termination journey: the sponsor that submits the termination request, and the RBC representative that actions the request and removes the employee(s) from plans. Because the journey has 2 key players, they both have different portals on which they perform their own tasks to fulfill a member termination.
The Overarching Problem:
There can be many employees in a termination request, meaning that if even one employee is not processed in a timely manner, it can hold back the entire request from being completed.
Specific player problems:
The major pain point for the existing journey of the Sponsor client:
Keeping awareness on the progress of termination requests and going from macro to micro on their platform with ease and transparency.
The major pain point in the existing journey of RBC representative:
RBC admins are not meeting the service level agreements (SLAs) for completing member terminations, as they struggle to determine which terminations are more time-sensitive than others (when a deadline is emerging and there are still outlying items in a request to be addressed).
How might we:
How might we better show a hierarchy to the RBC employees within their portal of what is nearing an overdue SLA (service level agreement) and show our sponsors clarity and transparency of a termination request.
Additional feature: Digitizing vesting instructions
While there was already an existing flow to terminate members from a plan, the business wanted to digitize the vesting plan details. The hope was that it would clearly define the next steps for both the sponsors and RBC employees. A new subtask needed to be added to the Sponsor flow, to define and the vesting instructions for the RBC admin to follow when removing an employee. There is a matrix that exists for the Sponsor to declare how each employee of their plan is to be terminated. The following possibilities are:
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The vesting period has been met, and assists can be released to the employee
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The vesting period has not been met, but the sponsor waives the period and releases assets anyway
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The vesting period has not been met, and RBC only releases the non-vested funds to the employee
The Solution for the Sponsor side:
On the sponsor’s portal, an additional subtask was added to the task of member termination. Within this subtask, there are different vesting instructions based on how the sponsor wanted to release funds to the terminated member. Instead of showing all the different vesting instructions at once on the page, I created a series of progressive disclosures where the admin answers 1-2 questions, and the system will inform the sponsor of the applicable forms to proceed with. The internal RBC employee will then pick up and action on the instructions within the next 30-90 days.
With this approach, cognitive load for the external sponsors is reduced as only the instructions that were relevant to each of the employees in the termination were displayed. The design has a clean and simple appearance and reduced visual clutter. Clarity and transparency are given to the sponsor as they gain knowledge about the next steps, even though they are not the ones to take action on it. It is still their employee and they are responsible for them until termination is fully processed.
Outside of the vesting instructions, I advocated for other UX changes that helped the overall user experience of the larger journey of member termination. I proposed filtering all member termination requests by year to reduce the loading time of the landing page. I also proposed the ability to filter by “termination request date” or "submission date”. This accounted for two different mental models and allowed sponsors to be able to find targeted termination requests with ease.
I also changed the termination request status UI. Originally, the request statuses were displayed in visually heavy pills, pulling attention away from the main CTA on the page. I kept the colour encoding, but made small dots beside the status titles instead of encasing them in large, visually heavy pills. This made the statuses scannable at a glance without pulling the eye path away from the CTA on the page.
The Solution for the RBC Internal side:
To solve the problem of member termination requests being forgotten and expiring in their SLA’s, I used iconography and colour to show hierarchy. The table on the loading page of the internal portal shows warning icons for requests that have an overdue SLA within them. Once the admin opens the request, the colour yellow is used to highlight the overdue items within. Ideally, I would have liked to explore preventative solutions instead of prescriptive ones, but due to time and finances, this was what was implemented.
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On top of this initiative, I advocated to be able to filter the table of requests by status. This allowed the admin to find and target different statuses efficiently. I would have also liked to implement a toggle to show only overdue requests, but again, time and budget were constraints and, as a result, this feature was not implemented.
The Impact:
Even though not all my suggested improvements could be made within the time and budget given, there was still a large impact.
The user time on task to complete the flow of Member Terminate was reduced by 57% after the release of my 2025 designs.
In the fiscal year of 2024, the average time on task for the sponsor to complete the Member Terminate flow was 2.7 minutes to work through 4 step task. In the fiscal year of 2025, my designs that had 5 steps (with vesting instructions now being added), the time on task had reduced to 1.18 minutes to complete. This is an overall decrease in time on task of 1.52 minutes after my designs had been made live on the product, showcasing higher usability and satisfaction in the product.
