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Integrate ICON IRA to Paychex Flex

401(k) Participant Integrated IRA Rollover Out Solution

Role

Product designer responsible for scoping, research, prototyping, usability testing, and dev support.

Scope

Allowing seamless fund transfer in Paychex for 401(k) participants by easily establishing an IRA with ICON

Logistics

3-month, cross-functional team including PM, Engineers, ICON Stakeholder, Content designer

Goal

Helping users move their retirement savings

Paychex Flex is a HCM platform offering payroll, retirement, etc, services to businesses and their employees. Within the Flex experience, employee can manage their 401(k) accounts.

This case study focuses on improving 401(k) saving transition experience and empowering users to make informed, confident financial decisions. There are two ways for them to move their money…

Unmet Needs

No IRA, no path forward

User scenario

Over 60% of 150k

user did not have an IRA

When Employee maxed out contributions or left the workforce, they had no easy way to continue saving for retirement. For this segment, the rollover experience wasn’t just inconvenient—it was a dead end.

User scenario

Over 60% of 150k

user did not have an IRA

Opportunity

Integrate a 3rd party IRA provider

into Paychex Flex.

Business Growth:

Paychex will get revenue-share by each new Icon account creation through the build-in integration.

Business Growth:

Paychex will get revenue-share by each new Icon account creation through the build-in integration.

User Engagement:

Expand employees’ options to continue saving for retirement, and reducing managements for their admins.

Live demo

Challenge

Preventing friction before it reaches users

Early in the project, stakeholders from Icon raised the need for a KYC (Know Your Customer) verification step upon IRA creation which introduced a 15–20 minute delay before users could proceed a rollover.

I mapped the full end-to-end workflow across both Paychex and Icon platforms. It became clear that this delay, paired with multiple redirects, would fragment the experience and risk user drop-off during a high-stakes financial decision.

Contribution - By Identified the UX risk, I created user journey map to advocated for a smoother MVP path with clearer user expectations and minimized friction, collaborated cross-functionally to shorten the KYC step to under 5 minutes in production, dramatically improving the user flow without compromising compliance.

Close to instant account completion

Redirect back to Paychex rollover automatically

Status update

Sync account creation status with Icon to fill the gap cross- platform

Research

I audited existing money transaction workflow in Heap, a product analytics tool, to get some useful data like conversions on each step to inform potential integration touch points.