Pharos

Background

State Street asked Digital Ventures to develop a product to solve for the pain points and frictions for Chief Risk Officers and Chief Investment Officers.

The Problem

CROs and CIOs need to constantly assess the news for potential impact on the portfolios they manage. For example, an outbreak of Zika Virus near a textile plant that provides socks for Nike could have an impact on that stock. With so many possible news sources and orders of impact, anticipating exposure to risk is an overwhelming task.

The Solution

The solution was Pharos, a new interface for risk professionals to scan and dive deep into information from thousands of external and internal sources (e.g. sell-side, buy-side, social media, news).

Pharos summarizes reports from risk analysis sources sources, news feeds and online articles to contextualize the impact of new information on a portfolio.

In essence, Pharos reads the news for a CRO/CIO and calculates possible exposure for stocks.

The Process

The goal of the project was define the features and create a proof of concept that Pharos could work. To start, we needed to create an interface that would make intuitive sense to a busy professional.

Sketches

To create an intuitive interface, I sketched several different interaction models.

“The Sentence” – users could read the chain of data that explained an exposure to risk in a simple sentence.
Bubbles – bubbles of various size visually demonstrated at a glance which news topics posed the most risk to a stock.
Node Network – the Pharos AI maps the relationship from news to stocks through a node network of various sizes, so I experimented with using it in the UI
Other sketches capturing some key screens in the product

User Flow

The user flow was designed around vertical and horizontal scrolling. Scrolling vertically would allow the user to probe deeper into a topic while scrolling to the left or right would show adjacent content.

UI Design

Once the interaction model and user flow was determined, I created the UI designs that would go into the final prototype. The visual style was based in part on State Street’s branding.

These UI designs show the main feature of Pharos. The product connects items in your portfolio to news that could indicate risk. In this example, Brexit could have a strong impact on investments in the British Pound and Barclays
The UI on the left shows a visualization of the most risk in the user’s portfolio. Using circles of relatives sizes quickly showed the most important information. Subsequent UIs showed alternate ways to look at investments
This short flow illustrates how the user can get to the news quickly without going through the individual investments.
Here is a portfolio detail view, showing all the investments inside and relative exposure.

Prototype

The video below shows the prototype flow we demonstrated at our final product definition meeting.

Results

At the time I left the project (paternity leave), Pharos was beginning the incubation phase of work. The team had discovered over a series of tests how to create a minimum viable product through the use of augmented intelligence. The AI that was finding the correlations between news events and stocks was still in the mix, but a human risk analyst looked through those correlations and completed the analysis. The result follows a trend in human augmentation rather than relying fully on artificial intelligence algorithms.