STRATEGY · PRODUCT DESIGN · TEAM LEADERSHIP
Fund Scoring, Investor Onboarding, and Next-Gen Branding
Orbit is Germany's premier boutique law firm specializing in funds, with a primary focus of offering legal advice to both fund managers and investors. The firm's consultancy encompasses a comprehensive range of legal areas related to the fund market, including corporate, regulatory, and tax law, along with compliance and sustainability issues. Orbit has an impressive roster of clients such as the European Investment Fund (EIF), Burda Principal Investments, Merantix, and Earlybird among many others.
In my role as Orbit's Head of Digital Product and Design, I was tasked with addressing is the opacity and complexity of fund investment due diligence and investor onboarding. For Limited Partners (LPs) and Fund of Funds (FoF) managers, the due diligence process is crucial yet daunting due to the difficulty in evaluating fund terms and their market positions. Similarly, the investor onboarding process is often slowed by cumbersome, paper-based methods, making it a tedious task for both investors and fund managers.
Beyond product design I was also responsible for creatively steering the development of a brand identity for the boutique fund law firm. Traditional legal branding often lacks a contemporary edge. Our challenge was to craft a distinctive brand that not only stood out but also embodied Orbit's premium services and expertise.
I led the creation of two digital products that were key to business success from idea to launch: Fund Scoring and Investor Onboarding. The Fund Scoring tool upgrades the due diligence process by providing a comprehensive and visual representation of fund terms, scored and placed within the market context to aid in smarter investment decisions. Meanwhile, the Onboarding tool streamlines the investor onboarding experience with a web-based platform that offers a fast, efficient, and secure process, moving away from traditional PDF forms and ensuring data encryption and safety.
Additionally, I played a key role guiding the creative process to shape Orbit's next-gen brand identity, emphasizing the firm's expertise, confidence, and proficiency, while preserving its distinctive edge. By subtly suggesting rather than explicitly stating the space theme, we anchored a visual style that integrates the sophisticated, dimensional aesthetics of glassmorphism and utilizes AI, specifically Midjourney, to create unique, futuristic visual elements.
Orbit
Head of Digital Product and Design
One Year Eleven Months
To respect confidentiality agreements, detailed aspects of this project have been withheld. The essence and outcomes are shared within the scope permitted by the NDA.
Most due diligence reports are lengthy and cryptic. Our goal was to demystify fund terms for investors, making them easy to understand and compare. Increased transparency helps make informed investment decisions.
This product allows fund managers to visualize a due diligence and fund term analysis. The fund is compared to market terms to bring greater clarity to investment choices, generating valuable data-driven insights that enable our users to measure, compare and correlate fund term levels.
Orbit's Fund Scoring has been well-received for its user-friendly approach to complex financial information, such as aligning market standard fees, assessing the aggressiveness of waterfall structures, and comparing fund terms.
Our goal was to streamline and accelerate the investor onboarding experience. By tailoring the process to suit each investor type, we ensured the most efficient and personalized journey, providing relevant information every step of the way.
Orbit's Investor Onboarding is an efficient and user-friendly a web-based platform that offers a fast, efficient, and secure process, moving away from traditional PDF forms and ensuring data encryption and safety. Within the initial months following our launch, we successfully onboarded dozens of investors, each contributing significantly, with some investments reaching into the millions of euros. The onboarding process was notably efficient, averaging around 20 minutes to complete.
Traditional legal branding often lacks a contemporary edge. Our aim was to forge a progressive, premium brand that mirrored Orbit's cutting-edge legal tech approach, and accurately reflected its forward-thinking services in the fund market.
In collaboration with a brand designer, we facilitated structured workshops and exercises, focusing the stakeholder team on defining key aspects of Orbit's brand - vision, values, audience, and positioning. This approach was aimed at unifying stakeholder perspectives and shaping a coherent brand strategy.
We delved into current design trends and competitor benchmarks, adopting an iterative process to refine the final design. We embraced glassmorphism for its sophisticated, dimensional aesthetics, and utilized AI, specifically Midjourney, to generate unique visual elements, thereby creating a futuristic brand backbone. This innovative branding strategy not only differentiated Orbit in the competitive legal tech landscape but also boosted its employer branding, attracting top talent in the industry.
The completion of the branding elements was followed by the creation of marketing collateral and a comprehensive style guide, ensuring brand consistency across all platforms.
This endeavor represented a dynamic blend of technology, design, and law, going beyond merely digitalizing processes to reimagine client-firm interactions for enhanced user-friendliness and innovation. Highlighting the transformative power of thoughtful design in the legal sector, the initiative showcased how forward-thinking approaches can revolutionize traditional practices.
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