Challenge

Define the role of digital for an asset management firm

Carmignac is a boutique French asset management firm that has been in existence for more than 30 years. When I joined the firm, they found themselves in a period of transition. To avoid the threat of disintermediation they wished to focus more effort on reaching end investors. Adding to this, Carmignac had also embarked on a rebranding effort.

Carmignac understood that digital had a big role to play in their transformation, but the firm had not previously taken the time to define the exact role that digital had to play within their business.

Upon joining the firm, I led the effort to define the role digital would play and to then to realise this within Carmignac’s digital presences.

With the role of digital agreed, the next step was to define how we would manifest this within digital experiences. As the Carmignac rebranding was focusing primarily on the visuals of the brand, I designed and led a series of three workshops to define experience principles.

The workshops included representatives from a variety of teams including fund management, product, sales, wealth management and compliance.

After a series of exercises and group writing activities, we arrived at a core set of six principles. The Experience Principles defined the name and definition of the principle, guidelines on how to best embody the principle as well as examples of other brands that exhibit similar principles. With this information, all teams were given a clear direction of how to use the principles in their work. Written in both English and French, the principles were shared in several sessions across the firm.

I led my UI design team to work with the Head of Communications and branding agency to finalise the new Carmignac brand. Key elements we had to ensure were that the new brand typefaces would work across a variety of digital products and offline communications. Additionally, we spent considerable time to ensure the new brand colour palettes would meet accessibility guidelines.

With these elements agreed, we began the creation of a brand new design system. The creation of the design system (in Figma) was coordinated with our development teams so that components initially designed in Figma would then be finally built and published in Storybook (using ReactJS).

The new design system would be used for all new digital products and also shared with third party vendors to speed design and development efforts.

To begin to realise the new digital strategy, the Carmignac website had to be redesigned as the existing presence did not adequately serve user or business needs. Additionally, it was decided that the website would be one of the first touchpoints to help launch the new Carmignac brand.

To “start small” and launch iteratively, the first elements of the experience we would redesign were the home page and the “Funds” page that lists all of Carmignac’s funds.

I led an iterative design process which incorporated user input (surveys and research) as well as the participation of several working groups comprised of members from sales, wealth management, product and compliance and working in both English and French.

Through several workshops and co-design sessions, my design team and I arrived at a final prototype to investigate further in user research.