Capital Markets
FIS Investor Onboarding
Turning private-fund subscription — PDFs, wet signatures, re-typed data — into software an LP could finish in a sitting.
Every private fund starts with a subscription document: a hundred-plus pages of legal representations, tax forms, and wire instructions, completed by hand and re-keyed by a chain of administrators. Inside FIS's innovation group, I led design on the product that made onboarding a workflow instead of a document.
The document is the API
Institutional LPs subscribe to dozens of funds and answer the same questions every time, from scratch. Each answer is typed into a PDF, emailed, and then re-keyed by three back offices. The document is the API, and the API is paper.
FIS sits underneath a huge share of that fund administration. I ran design for the innovation and incubation group, whose brief was to find the workflows worth rebuilding, prove them fast, and hand the business units something they would adopt. Investor onboarding was the sharpest case: high volume, pure friction, and every party already an FIS customer.
Data outlives the document
The unlock wasn't a prettier form. It was treating the investor's answers as durable data instead of ink. An LP who onboarded once could start the next subscription from a data pack: everything from the previous fund carried forward, editable, with only the deltas left to complete. The hundred-page document became a review step, not a data-entry job.
That reframing drove the whole design. The flow reads as stages an investor can see across, overview, prepare data, complete the subdoc, sign and submit, with progress that is honest about what is left. Jurisdiction logic prunes the questions that don't apply instead of shipping every LP the superset. The legal artifact still gets produced at the end; it is generated from the data rather than serving as the container for it.
Onboarding as stages: overview, prepare data, complete the subdoc, sign and submit
Three seats, one surface
Onboarding isn't one user. The LP wants to be done. The fund manager wants visibility into who is stuck. The administrator wants clean data they never have to re-key. We prototyped against all three seats and let the back-office reality discipline the investor-facing surface: every field mapped to where it actually landed downstream, which is what made the business case legible to the operating units. That is designing for operators first and screens second.
Like everything the incubation group shipped, it was proven with working software instead of decks. Prototypes went in front of real LPs and administrators and were timed against the paper process.
Outcome
The comparison against paper wasn't close. The product moved from lab bet to roadmap, and the way it got there, working software timed against the incumbent process in front of real users, became the pattern the group's later incubations followed.
- Reframe
- Investor answers as durable data; the subdoc generated from it
- Seats designed for
- LP, fund manager, fund administrator
- Status
- Moved from incubation bet to business-unit roadmap