In the financial industry, customers expect premium digital experiences, especially when they're starting to use a bank or financial institution. This process is called client onboarding and involves evaluating the customer's needs, doing legal checks, and setting up their account. It's a big process that requires different departments within the bank to work together like credit, operations, compliance, legal, front office, risk, and tax. It can take over a week for clients (the bank) to complete the process, and dealing with incomplete documents can make it take even longer. 

Our challenge as a consultant was to help our client revamp their onboarding system. The goal was to make the process more efficient by reducing the need for human involvement, automating tasks across different departments, and delivering a smooth experience for their customer. 

In this case study, I will explain I tackled this challenge with the team, specifically the improving of an approval workflow (authorization matrix), which is a critical feature in the customer onboarding process.



Roles & Responsibilities

Interaction Designer
Service Designer with other 3 talented designers, 3 UX Researcher, and a visual designer

Platform

Desktop-web
Mobile-web

Tools

Sketch, Invision

Timeline

2019-2021




The Feature: an Approval Workflow

An approval workflow is one of the features in the first sprint (MVP1) for which I am responsible.

Customer Onboarding

What is Approval Workflow?

The Company’s Approval Workflow (Authorization Matrix) outlines the functional and financial approvals required, and designates team members that are authorized to approve a transaction request.(Authorized Signatories).

The Approval Workflow also specifies limitations on approval authority based on approver group (authorization group title or responsibilities in the Company and a maximum baht amount for types of transactions).

Why is it so important?

It can define group of users who can make or approve a transaction by amount limits or by product type. Therefore, it's need to be customizable to meet different company's needs.





Timeline (Including Discovery Phase)

We spent the first couple of months to discover and understand the situation by conducting extensive research and user interviews (customers and internal bank staffs). Below is an overview timeline from design team's perspective.


My activities are highlighted in light blue color 





Research Activity

Primary Research

  • Stakeholder Interview
  • BU workshops
  • Heuristic Evaluation : Measure the usability of current systems. What’s good and what’s bad
  • An In-depth User Interview (conducted by UXR team)

Secondary Research

  • Competitor Analysis : Study Information Architect, Features, UI, and Interaction
  • Customer care data and other useful materials



Ideation and Design Activity

  • Redesign Customer Journey 
    • Unified/Seamless experiences including on-boarding activity
    • End-to-End process and Service transparency
    • Automated/ lower cost self-service for smaller clients
    • 24/7 Access to banking services through multiple channel (i.e desktop, mobile web, mobile app)
  • Redefine Business Proposition 
    • Customer-centric products fulfillment 
    • Experience differentiation by customer segments
  • Redefine Operating Models
    • Workflow and process automation
    • Elimination of admin's activities
    • Strive for service speed at lowest cost
  • Prioritize Digital Offering
    • Enablement of self-servicing capabilities
    • Real-time product capabilities
  • Bring new culture to the working teams
    • Establish a new way of working (i.e Agile, Customer-Centric Design)



Problem Space

After several interviews and follow-up activities have been done, here are example problems that we found

  • Technology-focused rather than User-focused
  • Technology used was outdated
  • No UX vision or Guiding principles : Inconsistency issues are found across platform, non-intuitive UI.
  • Lack of Comprehensive Product Strategy : no customer vision embed throughout program

Opportunity

  • Omni Channel and Personalization
  • Multi-channel platform supporting
  • A next generation of personalize self-service capabilities




Overview Work Approach

Since we had limited time and a lean team, we made an agreement with another team that we would allow some improvements based on recommendations from the usability testing, even though the design phase had already closed.



Get to know our corporate customers

  • Small and Medium Enterprise, Large Corporations
  • Required registration documents for verification and to register the services
  • Fee charge is different per product subscription or agreement while individual (Retail) receives the same fee which normally free of charge
  • Users may have difference roles and permissions 
  • Transaction need to go through approval workflow (authorization matrix) which may differ from each company.










Customer Journey

These customer journeys are the comprehensive results of customer research conducted during the Discovery phase, which begins even before customers choose the bank. These journeys provide a foundation for understanding customer activities, touchpoints, emotions, and opportunities for designers during the design phase.









A sample of Hi-level User flows

This is a sample user flow for an Approval Workflow feature that we used to communicate with the application design team and developers. Once we confirmed that it was feasible, we aligned with the rest of the project team and gained approval to proceed to the next step.



Design Iterations

We came up with 2 ways of setting up and approval workflow to support 2 majority of workflow patterns which are

Easy setup

  • A company that has just a group of the maker and a group of the approver. Regardless of how many users are in the group.
  • A company that has one workflow for a Payroll product and one for other products . or both products use the same workflow

Customized Workflow

  • A company that requires more than one group of the approver(s) per workflow. (either/all)
  • A company that requires a different amount of approvers from each group. For example, require one approver from group A with two approvers from group B.
  • A company that required a different approver group for a specific amount of transaction. For example, if a transaction is less than 10 million Baht will require 2 approvers from group A, while a transaction of 10 million Baht or more will requires 2 approvers from group A and 1 approver from group B.

From ideation to execution, my journey involved numerous design experiments aimed at achieving optimal usability. It's important to be transparent and admit that along the way, I encountered many setbacks, and at times, I felt like giving up. 

However, I persevered and put the design through rigorous testing and team’s feedback to ensure it met the highest standards. Armed with valuable insights from the testing process and some help from the team, I refined the design and made it even better.







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