According to the study, people with low income in Thailand don’t have access to financial services, especially those who don’t have a fixed income or are on a payroll.


One of the key findings, however, was that while some 59.2 percent of the debt was formal debt borrowed from legitimate financial institutions, 40.8 percent was considered underground debt, meaning debt owed to loan sharks. Also, those people with are not familiar with the application and document process can potentially lead to loan rejection.

It was a 6-month project to get the first MVP out to the market and continuously launch and improvement every two months.

Disclaimer: Some of the information below is intentionally vague. The image may be just a visual representation.



Roles & Responsibilities

Project Manager
Interaction Designer
Service Design
User Research
Visual Designer with other 3 designers

Platform

Mobile App

Tools

Sketch, Invision

Timeline

2019-2019


Problem Statement

  • These days, people who are not salaried employees don’t have much access to financial help due to their unsteady income and no credit history.
  • Applying for a loan is a lot of paperwork with strict procedures. Moreover, all those activities have to be done locally at a bank.
  • The loan underwriting can take days or even weeks until the result come out. Some people in need cannot wait any longer.




Discover Phase


Goals

  • Identify potential customer’s latent needs, and perceptions toward borrowing money (from friends or relatives, financial institutes, or loan sharks)
  • Understand their behavior and how they manage their money.
  • Develop and refine the finding into a product
  • To test out the concepts

Process

  • Secondary research from existing materials and previous workshop
  • Ideate with another three designers to generate 12 concepts for concept testing.
  • Concept testing to test out the concepts with 32 potential customers



Sample of Outcome and Key takeaway from Customer interview and Concept testing

  • Low-income participants pay more attention to how much they can repay per month over the interest.
  • Participants show interest in every other week's repayment because they are bi-weekly pay.
  • Participants show interest if they can apply for a loan online
  • The design approach is how to make loan products easy to use and less intimidating.


Representative of 12 ideas from ideations





Ideation Phase

The insight from the discovery phase helps us create the initial design principles.

Design Principles
 
 
Fast&Less effort Relevance Information and
Easy-to-Understand Terminology
 Less or none document




Challenge

  • How can we help our users decide how much to borrow and help them plan the repayment?
  • How can we digitize and optimize the loan application process to make financial help more accessible to people in a matter of minutes?
  • How can we optimize the document submission process for people who are not tech-savvy?
  • How can we notify them when the underwriting result is come out and reimburse money into their bank account?

Process

  • Design end-to-end flow, Customer Journey.
  • Carry out product wireframe and prototype.
  • Conduct usability testing of the design with 6 participants.
  • Improve and make refinement to the final product (MVP1).


Sample of Outcome and Key takeaway

  • Fully online digital lending platform (MVP 1)
  • Streamlined version of document submission process
  • The draft version of the product roadmap (in backlog)




Challenge

Landing screen

Copy and graphic will personalized
based on user's intent.




Sample screen





Bottom Line

  • There were some fields on the application process that we thought it's easy to fill in. Turn out it was hard for the users. They spent minutes figuring it out until they decided to drop out.
  • Some occupations have complicated earning or income structures. Make it hard for the users to figure out their actual monthly income.
  • Users don't trust the bank's loan decision if the result comes so fast says within a few seconds.
  • This product has a lot of room for improvement. There were lot of interesting features in the product roadmap before I rolled off from this project.
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