Morgan Stanley & E*TRADE: Holdings Unification

Background

In 2019, Morgan Stanley acquired E*TRADE with the goal of creating a single financial product that adheres to the needs of all users, ranging from high-net worth advised clients to lower-income day traders.

Fundamental to this strategy was designing a product that took the ‘best of both worlds’ from both the Morgan Stanley and E*TRADE experiences, knowing that each experience includes functionality that specifically serves their respective user base.

The first step in creating this newly merged product was redesigning the ‘Holdings’ experience for both Web and Mobile.

Define

‘Holdings’ is a highly complicated and trafficked experience which is fundamental to the management of one’s finances. It also encompasses very different requirements for each type of client, and thus must be flexible, with the ability to be customized to each client’s specific needs.

The first step was to conduct stakeholder interviews with the respective Product Owners of each experience. I specifically worked to understand their priorities, concerns, needs and pain points.

Once we had a better understanding of the business needs, I formed a design strategy, breaking the project down into 5 manageable experiences, each of which was to be tackled on it’s own.

We then conducted competitive research on each of the 5 core pieces of functionality.

Design

Now that we understood the ET and MS products as well as our competitors, we dove into design work, where the strategy was to ‘do no harm’. This essentially meant that we would not remove any functionality currently available to MS or ET clients on their respective platforms. In order to accomplish this, we worked in lockstep with the Product team to solve for complications along the way.

1. Sort & Filter

Requirements

Enable users to filter by product type, filter by symbol/CUSIP, sort by Standard views, and sort by Custom views.

Complications

MS has a more visual and robust product type filter that incorporates data, while ET uses a dropdown.
ET allows for multi-select on product types, while MS is single select.
ET dynamically updates columns based on sort selection, while MS does not.
The Standard views vary drastically between the two platforms.
Each product was built on a different code base and service, resulting in different capabilities.

Solution

Create a single sort dropdown for Custom and Standard views, using the ET Standard views as a default. Fill this gap for MS clients by creating a customize experience that allows them to recreate the Standard views they’re accustomed to if need be.
Create a search filter for symbols and CUSIP’s, this is net-new for MS clients.
Condense the MS product type filters into single-select pills. These allow for visual access to product filtering while removing redundant data and salvaging vertical space on the interface.
Dynamically update the table columns based on product type selection, this is net new for MS clients.

2. Customize

Requirements

Enable users to customize the Holdings table to suit their needs.

Complications

ET currently has a more complicated and robust customization experience, allowing clients to create custom views based on sorting, filtering product types, reordering columns and removing/adding columns altogether. These customized parameters are saved as a new view can be accessed repeatedly.
MS currently only allows clients to edit the table by reordering columns and adding/removing a select few. These edits are simply applied to the current interface and are not saved or easily accessed if the client logs out.
The ET Mobile product currently handles customization more similarly to the MS web experience.

Solution

Take the best of both worlds while ‘doing no harm’.

Allow clients to edit their current view (similar to MS) by clicking the ellipses on the table
Offer a more robust custom view creation experience (similar to ET) by click the ‘create custom view link’. Users can then save and easily access this view moving forward.

This solution allows for significantly more personalization than any other competing product.

3. Table

Requirements

Create a table that can scale to account for all product/symbol types, elevates actions, is built on a single grid, can scale, is not too dense to load, and notifies the users of various events, such as ex-dividend dates.

Complications

Certain asset classes, such as annuities, are more complicated to account for as they consist of 50+ characters. ET currently does not display these types of positions while MS just wraps their cells 5 lines while expanding the height of the row.
MS sporadically places their alerts across the row, while ET consolidates them in a single icon.
ET’s total row is on the bottom while MS is on top.
ET has 1 datapoint per column while MS stacks 2 at a time and uses 4 way sorting.
ET allows for only 1 level of nesting, while MS allows for 4.
ET’s row heights are fixed, while MS will scale them as high as necessary to fit all of the content.
Each product organizes their columns in a different order.
The entire page will crash if the table is too dense.

Solutions

Use middle truncation in order to limit lengthy symbol names to just 2 lines.
Use badges to consolidate all symbol level alerts to the left most cell.
Move the total row to the top to align with MS, as this is something ET clients have previously complained about.
Stack columns when necessary and implement 4 way sorting.
Limit nesting to just 3 levels in order to minimize load times while meeting the client’s basic needs.
Designed for the worst possible edge case and fixed the row height accordingly, saving hundreds of pixels of vertical space.
Default to MS column ordering, as clients can seamlessly reorder to their liking as shown above.
Offloaded as much content as possible by using pagination and modals.

4. Tax Lots

Requirements

Allow users to access their tax lot data for each position across accounts.

Complications

ET displays lot data behind 1 level of nesting while MS offloads it to a modal.
MS organizes lots by short and long term while ET does not.
Certain MS clients have so many lots that it would crash the ET framework.

Solution

Place the lot data under 1 or 2 levels of nesting depending on the view the user is currently in.
Create a standard ‘Cost Basis’ view that allows clients to seamlessly access long and short positions.
Implement a lazy load function so that the page doesn’t crash for client’s with 1,000+ tax lots.

Miscellaneous Experiences

In addition to the four core pieces of functionality, we also created designs for secondary experiences, such as a Quote Snapshot side panel, a ‘card view’ experience, and a Portfolio News section.

After delivering the initial designs and accounting for all edge cases, we conducted a round of unmoderated research with 13 users.

We tasked the participants with completing specific actions, such as locating their tax lots for a given position, filtering the table by product type, creating a custom view, buying/selling a position, and viewing the quote snapshot of a position.

The usability test was largely successful, as 10/13 participants reporting the tasks were ‘very easy’ to complete.

That said, we still made a few tweaks to the designs following the research results:

Now that we had the web experience fully designed and validated with users, we moved onto Mobile.

The approach with the Mobile product was to be highly selective when adding functionality while working to offload some of the more dense experiences from the main interface.

Deliver

Finally, it was time to deliver designs for every action, use case and edge case.

Once the designs were completely delivered, we clearly outlined the differences between the MS and ET final products and their respective predecessors.

Improvements for Morgan Stanley Clients

Clearer information hierarchy
Enhanced Product specific views
New custom views
Faster load times
Easily accessible tax lot information (don’t have to leave the page)
Dynamic column width (less side scrolling)
Simplified table customization & memory
Contextual sheets for relevant information

Improvements for E*TRADE clients

Clearer information hierarchy
Product specific views
New custom views
More tax lot information
Simplified table customization & memory
Contextual sheets for relevant information

Next Steps

As of January 2025, the Holdings web experience is in development and Phase 1 is expected to be released by Q3’25.

We are currently still finalizing the Mobile designs with the goal of an early 2026 release.

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