Overview

At JPMorgan Wealth Management, I worked on the Self-Directed Investing product, which serves more than two million clients. One of the top complaints from users was that navigation felt clunky and “too banking-first.”

Unlike Fidelity or Schwab, which are investment-first apps, Chase is a super app: banking, cards, benefits & travel, auto, and then investing layered on top. This created a real challenge: how do we give clients an investment-first experience inside a banking-first environment?

Framing the problem

When we dug into research and analytics, a few key themes stood out. Clients didn’t feel like they were in a true investing experience. Multi-account clients (13% of the base, but with 10× higher balances) had to jump through too many hoops to switch between accounts.

Almost half of clients went straight to their positions page — but it was buried under “More.” In loss studies, 40% of clients who left Chase mentioned navigation. One even moved over $1M to Fidelity, saying,

“It’s easier to explore other offerings there [Fidelity].”

These insights made it clear: poor navigation wasn’t just an annoyance — it was driving attrition and missed opportunities.

How we approached it

We started with a loss study that flagged navigation as a top reason for attrition, then looked deeper. Competitive analysis showed that Schwab and Fidelity put investing actions right into the bottom nav, while Chase’s was banking-oriented. Analytics confirmed what clients were telling us: after checking balances, they went straight to their positions.

From there, I sketched and prototyped low-fi concepts, partnering with a horizontal app team to ensure we used reusable components and stayed consistent with the broader app. We validated designs through usability testing, then partnered with PMs to structure the rollout as an experiment with clear success and guardrail metrics. Below are some of the low-fidelity concepts of which elements had to be descoped after assessing timelines and sized effort.

The solution

The redesign introduced tabbed navigation: Overview, Positions, Watchlists, right under the new account header. This brought the most visited destinations to the surface.

We also added an in-context account selector in the header, saving clients multiple steps when switching between accounts.

The “More” menu still exists, but it’s now for secondary tasks. Core actions like Explore, Trade, and Transfer stay visible at the center of the dashboard.

What we saw

The experiment results spoke for themselves:

• CTR to Positions jumped from 24% → 42% (+73% lift)
• Watchlist CTR tripled (6% → 18%)
• Engagement on Positions more than doubled (13% → 30%)
• Watchlist engagement saw a 229% lift

And importantly: no negative impact on trading or funding, which were our guardrail metrics.

These wins gave leadership confidence that navigation could be a lever for retention and engagement, not just a UX polish project.

What’s next?

One limitation was leaving out the performance page despite having tested so well in the nav system, which was still hybrid web. With strong results in hand, we’re now building the case to “nativize” it and fold it into the new nav. We also kept pushing. In September 2025, we released a second navigation experiment with extended tabs and reorganized flows. Early results from a 25% rollout are already promising:

• Funding confirmation up 52%
• Trading up 11%
• Transfers up 3%
• Funding actions up 12%
• Explore slightly down (–6%), which was expected and we’re monitoring

This iterative work is steadily transforming Chase from a banking-first app into a true investing platform, one that reduces attrition, supports consolidators, and better serves our multi-account clients.