Firms keep rebuilding it. Usage keeps not materialising. The reason is not the portal.
Login rates are consistently lower than firms expect, engagement concentrates in a small proportion of clients, and most sessions are short and check one thing.
The response is usually to build a better portal. The result is usually the same.
They hired you so they would not have to. Delegation is the product. A portal asks them to resume a task they paid to hand over.
They also have to remember it exists, find the login, and have a reason on that particular day. Three points of friction against a mild curiosity.
Clients who like detail, clients in a transition, and clients who are worried. That third group is the useful signal — a spike in logins from a specific client is information.
Low usage is not a failure of the portal. It is clients behaving exactly as the relationship intends.
Push rather than pull. Send the thing rather than making them fetch it. A short proactive message outperforms an excellent portal for almost every client.
Then make the portal good enough for the minority who want it, and stop measuring the firm's technology by its login rate.
Documents. When a client needs a statement or a tax form, they need it immediately and usually under time pressure.
That single use case justifies the portal. Most of the rest of the build does not.
Concluding that clients do not care about technology. They care intensely — about onboarding, money movement, and follow-through. Those are just not in the portal.
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