UX/UI Case Study

ESG Simulator

A portfolio analysis platform that helps advisors lift ESG ratings with minimal disruption — recommending alternative holdings that respect each client's preferences, then packaging the rationale into an advisor-ready report.

Role

Senior product designer

Client

Synechron

Overview

Sustainable investing, without rebuilding the portfolio

ESG Booster analyzes a portfolio across Environmental, Social, and Governance metrics, benchmarks it against major ESG indexes, and proposes an "alternative portfolio" — a set of targeted swaps that improve the ESG rating while staying true to the client's sector preferences, risk tolerance, and investment goals.

Advisors can review the recommendations, adjust constraints, and export a report to take into the next client conversation for discussion or approval.

Discovery & Strategy

Interviewed portfolio managers and ESG specialists to map the analysis workflow, decision points, and the constraints that shape "acceptable" trades.

Interaction & Visual Design

Designed the simulator dashboard, comparison views, and reporting flow — translating dense ESG data into glanceable, advisor-friendly views.

Prototyping & Validation

Built interactive prototypes for stakeholder reviews and usability sessions inside the Synechron Innovation Lab Accelerator.

ESG data is everywhere — actionable answers aren't

Advisors are increasingly asked by clients to "make my portfolio more sustainable" — but the path from intent to action is messy. ESG scores from different providers disagree. Index benchmarks vary by methodology. And any change to holdings has to respect the client's existing preferences, sector exposure, and risk profile.

Most tools surface scores. Very few help an advisor decide what to actually do next — and even fewer can defend that recommendation in a client meeting.

Before: Score-First Tools

• Advisors pulled ESG scores from one vendor, manually compared against another, and built spreadsheets by hand.

• Recommendations relied on memory and instinct — with no audit trail for why a holding was swapped.

• Client preferences (e.g. "no tobacco", "keep energy exposure") lived in CRM notes, disconnected from analysis.

• Reports were assembled in slides — hours of work per client review.

After: ESG Booster

• Multi-vendor ESG scores benchmarked side-by-side against sector indexes in a single view.

• Algorithm suggests an alternative portfolio with the minimum number of swaps needed to hit a target ESG rating.

• Client preferences are inputs to the model — exclusions, sector caps, and risk bands shape every recommendation.

• One-click export produces a client-ready report covering rationale, trade-offs, and projected ESG lift.

What is ESG?

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria are a set of standards for a company’s operations that socially conscious investors use to screen potential investments. Environmental criteria consider how a company performs as a steward of nature. Social criteria examine how it manages relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, and the communities where it operates.

-Investopedia

Insight 01

Trust the math, but show the work

Advisors wanted algorithmic recommendations they could defend in front of a client — not a black box. Every swap had to come with a clear "why".

Insight 02

Minimal disruption beats maximum score

A perfect ESG portfolio is useless if the client refuses to sign off. Advisors valued the smallest possible set of changes that still meaningfully moved the rating.

Insight 03

The conversation, not the dashboard, is the deliverable

Advisors live in client meetings. The platform had to produce something tangible — a report — that translated complex analysis into a story a client can follow.

01

02

Preferences as first-class constraints

Client preferences — exclusions, sector caps, ESG priorities, risk bands — sit at the top of the simulator, not buried in settings. Changing a constraint immediately re-runs the recommendation, so the advisor sees exactly how each guardrail shapes the outcome.

03

Report as the natural endpoint

Every screen in the flow contributes to the final report. By the time the advisor clicks Export, the rationale has already been written — they're curating, not authoring. The report becomes a by-product of the analysis, not a separate task.

Design iterations

Defining the interaction model

The goal of the design was to create an interaction model that allowed users to view meaningful contextual data.

Design Walkthrough

From portfolio in, to report out

The advisor moves through four core moments: understanding the portfolio, tuning the simulation, comparing the alternative, and exporting the conversation piece.

Portfolio Dashboard

Users can view the health of their portfolio based on the total ESG score, comparison of their portfolio against other benchmarks and their portfolio performance based on highest or lowest ranking companies.

Company Analysis

Review overall ESG Score for each company. Each category is broken down for a granularity. For instance, we can see how the Environmental score is broken down further to resource use, emissions and innovations.

Swap Companies

If there are companies that have a lower ESG score, we can find alternative companies to replace poor performing ones based on sector and industry. The system is smart enough to find other company in within the same sector.

News & Events

News sentiment has a direct impact on the ESG score. Review which new articles are having the greatest impact on the performance.

Forecasting

Projection of portfolio’s performance based on the list of companies.

Simulating Company Swaps

Simulation helps portfolio managers simulate what the performance of their portfolio could be if they replace poorer performing companies with higher performing ones. Simulating helps visualize a hypothetical scenario before applying real changes.

Investable Universe

The database on companies are fed to the investable universe. Portfolio manager’s can help filter down the list of companies based on the ESG performance they are setting for.

Project Outcomes

Results & Impact

ESG Booster shipped out of the Synechron Innovation Lab Accelerator as a demonstrable platform for wealth-management clients exploring sustainable investing offerings.

Accelerator

Selected for Synechron Innovation Lab showcase

Faster

Portfolio ESG analysis vs. manual spreadsheet workflow

Client-Ready

Exportable reports replaced ad-hoc slide decks

Defensible

Every recommendation backed by rationale and constraints

Learnings

What this project taught me

Designing for an advisor's workflow is really designing for a conversation. The platform doesn't end at the dashboard — it ends in a client meeting. Anchoring every design choice to that downstream conversation kept the product focused on usefulness over completeness.

In a domain as data-dense as ESG, restraint is its own feature. Showing fewer, better-framed numbers — and explaining the deltas — built more trust than wall-to-wall dashboards ever could.

The Innovation Lab Accelerator format also reinforced how valuable rapid prototyping is when designing against an unfamiliar domain. Putting clickable artifacts in front of portfolio managers early surfaced misunderstandings that no spec document would have caught.