Charles Schwab
Untangling complexity inside a large-scale financial platform
Helped redesign complex financial workflows and improve product consistency during the TD Ameritrade transition while contributing to a more scalable design systems foundation.
Schwab Advisor Center is a dense, data-heavy platform built for financial advisors managing client accounts at scale. After the TD Ameritrade acquisition, Schwab retained Advisor Center as the surviving platform and needed to bring over features from the competing system that advisors from over 7000 firms were used to—fast, and without losing trust during the transition.
Across this engagement, I worked across multiple core areas of the platform: design system and governance, navigation and account switching, and a full modernization of the balances, profiles, and documents pages.
Focus | Outcome |
Advocated for a dedicated design system built for advisors—not adapted from Schwab's customer-facing banking system, which prioritized whitespace over the density advisors needed | Got buy-in after years of negotiation; led the system's full build-out and its transition to Figma with training and documentation for design and engineering teams |
Designed navigation and the account "context switcher" used platform-wide, accounting for how each context change altered what content was even possible to show | Gave advisors a consistent way to navigate the platform without losing their place |
Redesigned the balances, profiles, and documents experience to work correctly across five different account-context views (firm, master account, individual account, account holder, custom groups) each with different backend limitations | Replaced manual processes with dynamic systems, while staying within real technical constraints. New layouts made it easier for advisors to find critical information in fewer clicks—a metric they cared about deeply |
I consistently found that the platform's biggest issues came from teams defaulting to short-term patches over systemic fixes—a pattern shaped by how project funding and timelines worked.
Part of my role became identifying which problems needed an immediate fix and which needed a longer-term structural solution, and helping teams make that call before more patches got layered on.