LPL’s Client Works platform supports high-volume money movement for 20K+ financial advisors, spanning ACH, wire, and check transactions—each with distinct rules and validation requirementsA prior $22M investment focused on ACH—the highest-volume transfer type—but adoption remained low. Advisors still relied on legacy workflows for other transfer types, making a standalone solution insufficient despite addressing the largest segment.
Standardized transaction behavior across all transfer types through a shared system model.
With new standardized experience, the simplest and the most complex experience can be organized in common order and layout, allowing us to optimize familiarity and clarity by modeling the experience after shopping cart.
The redesign didn't just modernize an interface — it restored something the legacy experience had quietly eroded: advisor confidence in the platform. Transfers that once required manual follow-up, workarounds, and phone calls to confirm completion could now be executed independently, accurately, and in significantly less time. For advisors managing transfers on behalf of clients, that shift wasn't just operational — it was professional. The platform was finally doing its job so they didn't have to do it for them.
The following results reflect the ACH and Check release. Wire had not yet launched at the time of measurement.
Move Money exposed how easily organizations can optimize for the wrong signal. The business initially focused on ACH because it represented the majority of transfers, but advisors rejected the standalone solution since they still needed the legacy system for wires and checks. The metric was right, but the conclusion was wrong. Instead, we focused on what the data actually revealed: 90% of transfers went to account owners, which led us to streamline the primary workflow, unlock saved instructions through compliance partnership, and reduce the experience to the fewest possible inputs.
The project also exposed how averages can hide reality. Initial data suggested advisors had 10–12 saved instructions on average, but most actually had only 1–3, while a small group had more than 50. Designing for the “average” would have optimized for almost no one. Challenging those assumptions helped shape a more scalable experience for the highest-volume transaction workflow at LPL Financial, balancing usability, compliance, and operational reliability in a high-trust financial environment.
