Getting 256,000 clients through MFA enrollment without a support meltdown
Northern Trust needed every institutional and private-client customer to enroll in multi-factor authentication. The catch: over 30 business units, running on overlapping legacy platforms, with zero shared components between them. Ship MFA badly and the Customer Support Center would drown in confused calls from clients who'd banked the same way for twenty years.
Role: Lead Product Designer
Team: Director of Security Architecture, PM, 6 engineers, 3 QA, Scrum Master, and myself
Timeline: Should have been done yesterday (1 year)
MFA itself wasn't hard to design. Getting 30+ independent business units to implement it consistently was. There were no shared grids, no reusable components, no common typography rules — each unit had built its own version of "the login screen" over the years, so any new security flow risked becoming one more one-off.
So the brief became: design MFA once, in a way that 30 different teams could implement it on 30 slightly different development platforms seamlessly without downtime or customer friction.
The problem underneath the problem
What I built
A modular enrollment framework built on Northern Trust's existing design system: reusable enrollment flows, standardized authentication states, and a shared Figma library with tokens engineering could consume directly. This became the org's first API-connected MFA design library spanning multiple platforms.
What testing told us
Clickable prototypes surfaced one insight that shaped everything after it. When we gave users too many verification-method choices, the reaction wasn't confidence — it was:
"Why am I making this choice? You're the experts."
The direction: fewer decisions, more guidance, and MFA that told people what to do rather than asking them to configure it.
Institutional teams managing pensions adopted early and became internal champions. Units serving older private-client customers were more skeptical. Rather than mandate it top-down, I ran staggered rollouts and used the institutional teams' early success as proof it wouldn't overwhelm support — that's what got the holdouts on board.
Getting 30 business units to actually use it
Results
256,000 institutional and private clients enrolled with no service disruption and no meaningful spike in support volume
Northern Trust's first API-connected MFA design library, now used across federated platforms
Reusable components replaced one-off, per-unit builds across 30+ product teams