SFW | Portfolio

Sabrina Jiang's Portfolio

Product designer | Product Design manager

SME Financing Workflow

DBS Institution Banking Group | 2021

The Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Financing Workflow (SFW) platform is a workflow enhancement system aimed to improve DBS employee productivity when processing loans for SME customers.

Through this platform, DBS employees can quickly create loan applications, conduct credit assessments, approve loans, and prepare offers for SME customers.

The original credit assessment system was cumbersome, inefficient, and very limited in feature scope. This meant that DBS staff performed most tasks manually. Our goal was to design a robust system that improved employee productivity and implement quality of life features to support their daily work, ultimately reducing the loan turn around time for our customers.

Key responsibilities

Leadership

Collaborated with product team to structure product vision and design strategy
Identified improvement opportunities through employee workflow deep dives
Drove alignment and co-development with stakeholders and executive leadership

Exploration

Execution

Clarified ambiguous requirements and explored design concepts.
Optimized and iterated design solutions to solve specific pain points through close collaboration with end-users

Management

Managed design sprints for 5 designers and prioritized design tasks to ensure on-time deliverables
Mentored and supported team to ensure innovative and high-standard design solutions

Success metrics for MVP

Project highlights

Organize overwhelming information and structure the design strategy

Challenge

Due to an extreme amount of complex information, it was difficult to discover design opportunities

A complicated process: In order to process 1 loan, it needed to be routed between 16 personas/employees across 5 different departments
Insufficient context, understanding, and documentation around each persona's tasks e.g. Persona 1 is asked to perform certain tasks to support Persona 5's job, but Persona 1 doesn't understand the task or why the task needed to be performed

How did I resolve the challenge

1. Conducted research

Understand users

Goal, KPIs and motivation
Tasks and workflow
Decision making process
Pain points

Understand business requirements

Governance, risk management, and compliance
Underlying business concept and knowledge

Understand tech constrains

Current internal and external systems capability and limitations
Future vision and strategic plans to improve and migrate the systems

2. Connected the dots and organized the overwhelming information

I Leveraged the service blueprint to document the overall workflow and tasks for each persona. This helped us have a holistic understanding of the customer and employee journey, and how they interacted with underlying systems.

I also strategically analyzed and documented business requirements. This helped us breakdown vast and complex requirements into manageable tasks.

What is the business concept and why is it needed?
What are the requirements and backend logic?
How does this translate into each persona's tasks?
What are the current pain points?

3. Identified customer pain points and opportunities

4. Conceptualized product and design strategy. Aligned vision, roadmap, and tactical plan with stakeholders and leadership for each release.

MVP (Release 1)

UX goal

Streamline Relationship Manager's (RM) case preparation process to improve work efficiency and provide accurate customer information for downstream employees.

Design timeline: 3 months

Streamline user tasks and explore design solutions

One of our main goals was to help end users (RMs) better understand customers' current borrowing status and propose new loans.

Outcome

How did I achieve this

1. Clarified requirements and analyzed the information architecture (IA) and main user tasks / goals

IA for limit threshold requirements

Every company has a loan limit threshold that is determined by their risk profile. However, there are other loan limits that exist and are determined by a set of complex factors. All these conditions must be factored in when determining a company's loan limit.

Borrower group threshold - Companies that are related through ownership (i.e. same shareholder share a borrower group threshold.

All limit threshold - There is a threshold for all loans (TFL), a threshold for secured loans (TCL), and a threshold for unsecured loans (CCL).

Loan type threshold - All loans can further be categorized into a "mainstream" and "others" bucket, and each have different TFL, TCL, and CCL threshold requirements.

2. Explored different design direction and validated with end users (RM).

I discovered that 3 other systems in DBS have similar components to this project and all of them share the same users. It made sense to standardize the design pattern to maintain the user experience.

Initial design to align existing design patterns

I validated this with our customers and discovered that the current design patterns could still be improved so I iterated based on feedback and updated our design library.

Existing design pattern pain points

Viewing linked collaterals is very frequently used feature. It's tedious and inefficient to expand every loan item individually to see attached collaterals
It's difficult to quickly scan loans because the collateral section breakdown is in-between loan items
In order to accurately propose a loan offer, users needed to see the threshold and remaining balance of the customer but the existing system only showed existing total loan amount. This meant that users needed to manually calculate the remaining balance.

User workflow

3. Iterated design and updated design pattern library

We discussed our findings with other design and product teams across DBS to consolidate common use cases and finalize design details.
We added all definitions and learnings to the DBS design pattern library and launch the product. It is currently being used and widely adopted across multiple systems within DBS.