Northern Trust – Private Passport Authentication Redesign

Private Passport is the primary authentication gateway to Northern Trust’s wealth and institutional platforms, securing access to billions in client assets. I owned the end-to-end redesign of this trust-critical flow, from experience audit and strategy through to implementation, focusing on security, clarity, and user confidence in a regulated financial environment.

The Strategic Challenge


The existing authentication experience had become technically brittle, inconsistent across channels, and unnecessarily difficult for users. Beyond usability issues, the larger challenge was maintaining trust at the moment of highest risk: ensuring users could authenticate confidently, recover safely from errors, and clearly understand system feedback in a security-sensitive context.

This work sat at the intersection of design, engineering, compliance, and client services, where small interaction decisions carried outsized consequences.

My Role


I owned the product experience for Private Passport and worked closely with engineering, security, and compliance partners to ensure the solution balanced usability, risk, and platform constraints.

  • Audited legacy authentication flows and identified failure points, friction, and accessibility gaps

  • Defined experience principles focused on error prevention, clarity of feedback, and recovery

  • Designed core interaction patterns and states across login, verification, and exception handling

  • Partnered with cross-functional teams to align on priorities and implementation trade-offs

Accessibility & Human Insight


Research showed that a significant portion of Private Passport users were over 50, with varying levels of vision impairment and technical confidence. This insight directly informed design decisions, including larger interaction targets, explicit feedback, clear language, and carefully timed animation to reduce uncertainty and prevent mistakes.

These patterns were later adopted as reference examples by other teams across the bank.


Outcomes

  • 18% reduction in post-launch support tickets, indicating improved error resilience

  • 15% increase in platform engagement following rollout

  • Established reusable authentication patterns applied across onboarding and personalised dashboard experiences


Why It Matters


Authentication is a moment of truth. Success depends on users feeling confident, informed, and in control while the system enforces necessary security constraints.

This project reflects how I approach trust-critical design: using research to anticipate failure, designing interactions to prevent harm, and ensuring that security-sensitive systems earn user trust through clarity rather than friction.