Role & Company: Product Design Lead
Dec 2021 - Feb 2023

Sharesies - Rights Offers

Sharesies offer their investors the chance to buy discounted shares on their platform. In the investing world, these events are called ‘rights offers’, ‘options’, and ‘warrants’ and they all fall under the umbrella of Voluntary Corporate Actions (VCA). VCA’s give investors the opportunity to buy shares at a cut price but they come with conditions and at the times might not be the perfect deal. They can end up costing investors more money.

We needed to educate and inform investors of these risks and help them understand how they work, what to expect, and what opportunities they could bring.

So far, over 50% of investors had not exercised their rights. Investors are missing out on potential investment opportunities when they don’t know what or when they should be exercising their allocated rights. – Data captured following a series of live VCA’s

Situation

Sharesies investors were taking part in Voluntary Corporate Actions, such as ‘rights offers’. Sharesies saw a great number of investors not exercising their rights on time which resulted in either the investor missing out on the opportunity, investors didn’t understand what they were and so didn’t take part, investors didn’t exercise their rights because they didn’t know that had to. All in all, investors were missing out which resulted in an increase in customer complaints and inquiries to Sharesies customer services team.

Commonly, corporate actions can be complex and knowing whether they’re a good thing or not, can be tricky to work out, for your average investor.

We wanted to understand what was going on so we planned and facilitated rounds of observations with users. We discovered a series of pain points and learned what our investors were doing and thinking at that time.

Tasks

To understand what was actually happening we facilitated a series of user research observations and interviews.
Our research found that investors wanted to understand the rights offer to figure out if this was an opportunity that would work for them and their portfolio.
The existing design made the rights offers feel mandatory and investors had to participate.
Investors were confused when they exercised their rights and what might happen next, this wasn’t being made clear to them.
Investors who held shares and were allocated rights automatically but weren’t made aware of this so they missed out on an investment opportunity.

Actions

We worked with our Product Manger to identify the primary opportunities that we could make that made the largest positive impact to users that can be delivered sooner.
We used an ‘Opportunity Tree’ to collate our ideas, opportunities, and tests, to help us keep track.
We worked closely with developers and content designers to revise key screen content and their components.
We facilitated a co-creation workshop to ideate around those secondary opportunities to learn how we can further help our users. Workshop outputs showed promising ideas around creating further education content and marketing awareness.

Actions: Educate users on ‘Rights Offers’Education was one solution to helping users understand this Voluntary Corporate Action ‘Rights Offer’. This education slide pattern were displayed before the user entered into the main rights exercising user flow. For those first time investors these slides were only seen once. Users could still access a guide to learn more about ‘Rights Offers’ via a banner that displayed in the ‘Rights Offer’ detail screen.

Actions: Improving users comprehensionWe knew users were confused at this step in the rights exercise user flow. The user flow reused the original ‘buy and sell’ shares screens and content. This misled users because it gave users the impression that they are buying or selling shares, not exercising rights.

We intentionally revised the layout and content to help users see the differences in these type of investment interactions.

Additionally, we added further details in the offer detail screen to describe to users what events will happen and when. This greatly helped users understand how rights offers work.

Results

We learned that investors found the education slides helped them understand what to expect when participating in the ‘rights offer’.
Redesigning the ‘buy & sell’ screen helped users understand the differences and what action that should be taking.
Users reacted positively when reviewing the revised rights offer content as it told them what to expect from this process.
Sharesies saw an increase in investors exercising their rights due to the improvements in the ‘Rights Offer’ user flow.
Sharesies helpdesk saw fewer inquiries about ‘Rights Offers’.