GAC - Application Management Tool
Grow Admin Console is an application management tool built for bank agents to manage financial products applications customers apply. The main functionality of the product is to surface highlighted information for bank agents to examine and assess when going through the approval process.
Grow technologies , acquired by ATB Financial, is a Vancouver Fintech startup that focuses on delivering self-serve and omni-channel banking experiences, solutions including retail and business account opening and lending.
Company
ATB Financial
Role
Product designer
Prior to the acquisition, GAC was served to other financial institutions based on specific needs. With new partnership with ATB Financial, we recognize that the tool has to cater to their banking system and processes. We began by exploring and talking with numbers of stakeholders in different areas within the organization to understand their current internal process.
After we had a better overview on the organizational structure, we wanted to narrow down our focus on our target user - the Client Care team, to understand how our product currently intervenes within their working process. With this clear goal in mind, I began to scope out a research plan by first defining the objectives, hypothesis, potential participants and methods that are applicable for the goal of this study. Working closely with my product manager, we interviewed and shadowed six participants.
Participant and direct observation at the Client Care department
Multiple tools and screens opened
Collaborating with the team including developers and product managers, we ran a HMW brainstorming session to prioritize the findings and define the appropriate areas to tackle on. We recognized that changing the core banking system would be a huge project that ties into other stakeholders. To keep the scope contained, we decide to focus on improving usability by adapting users’ working process to the workflow and integrate relevant information from other banking tools to extend our product.
Main takeaways:
1 Users spend a long time on navigating to find key information
2 During examination, ID verification is the major step that slows down decision-making
3 Core banking system is slow and rigid, requiring a lot of manual process between tools
4 Currently has no way to track team performance and application flow
Context
Currently, the application page is displayed and organized in a pipeline format in one single page without a clear indication of when an application is ready to be reviewed. GAC users have to constantly scroll through applications that are not relevant and reply on using filters to surface the most updated applications.
Application page - As a user, I cannot keep track on my own claimed application
Restructure navigation flow
To understand how the current information is being structured, the first task I did was to define the current architecture and rearrange the navigation flow.
Redefine application and step logic
To prevent users from constantly spending time on searching open applications to review, a way to solve this is to divide applications in different categories based on step progress to provide a clear threshold of when an application can be reviewed.
Improve header section and microinteractions
1 Having predefined application type on side navigation
2 Surfacing filters to prevent cognitive overhead
3 Clean up irrelevant feature - bulk download documents
4 Better search capabilities
View full ux documentation
Context
According to FinTrac compliances, it is required for bank agents to use required methods to verify the applicant identity and authenticity of provided documents. Through shadowing our users, we recognized users spent a long time matching personal information between applicant ID, agreements and credit bureau. To narrow down the problem, we began on improving the ID document page.
Currently ID document page is not displaying relevant information from the ID. As a user, I have to preview the image to review ID information.
Redefine storing documents logic and interaction
1 Grouping documents as a set for fraud verification purposes
2 Surfacing ID information from OCR results
3 Better microinteraction for viewing and re-uploading documents
Photo documents in card format | OCR information is displayed along with fraud detection mapping to the verification checklist
Managing documents: Modal interaction