Please note that the detailed content of this project is confidential and not to be shared in public.
Overview
Objective: finding a solution to validate the eligibility of a home loan for a customer who is nearing retirement during the term of the proposed loan
My role: led the project, doing UX and UI design
Team members : principal designer, iteration manager, subject matter expert, a dev team
Stakeholders: four product owners, four business analysts
Time spent: 30% of the working hours over 4 months
Background
Currently, if a customer will be 70 years or older during the term of the proposed loan, the banker is supposed to indicate how the customer will make loan repayments post-retirement. However, a detailed discussion and documentation of the customer’s repayment strategy and plan do not currently happen.
To meet NAB’s responsible lending obligations, the new policy requires bankers and brokers to inquire about a customer’s loan repayment strategy post-retirement, verify it, and document it. We call this project “Exit Strategy.”
Problem to solve
A loan repayment strategy was used until the new policy was announced. Now, banks require collecting evidence in such complicated conditions. Also, bankers (end users) fear that they will have extra work to do.
I wanted to simplify the banker’s task while ensuring they find it easily at the most appropriate platform location. This was challenging since there are many platforms where different (or the same) data sits, and they don’t communicate well.
Process
- Initiative
- De-brief
- Planning
- Problem Statements
- Banker’s Jobs To Be Done
- Hypothesis
- Ideation
- Prototypes
- Concept Testing
- Feedback & Sharing the insights
- Iteration & clickable hi-fi prototypes
- Usability Testing
- Implementation – MVPs
The outcome
A new tool, Exit Strategy, allows bankers to manage evidence of repayment from applicants over 55 years old or within 10 years of their planned retirement age. My main design focus was “How might we minimise the banker’s effort and time while they are talking to the customer, allowing them to focus more on the conversation?”
The outcome is a new Web app tool that contains 3 strategies (non-linear) that mostly auto-evaluated the customer’s eligibility. We leveraged the data to be prepopulated from other platforms and significantly reduced the need for manual input, allowing bankers to help customers apply for loans within 15 minutes. Before the implementation stage, the Business Lending team invited me to present this project, and they adopted my design solution to support the Business Lending experience.
Next steps
Further research/validation is required around:
– Mapping user flows from Exit Strategy to the repayment evidence documentation (data pulling/non-NAB data integration or documents especially for Superannuation and Downsize Home property value).
– Consider putting all 3 strategies on one page as the auto-populated information become brief after numbers of iterations.