SavvyMoney: Integrated credit score solution for financial institutions.
SavvyMoney Inc. is a B-B-C fin-tech startup. It ofers a comprehensive credit score solution (score, report and monitoring) to financial institutions (FI's) by integrating within their online and mobile banking platforms. It also ofers them (FI's) a business intelligence tool, SavvyMoney Analytics, to analyze the credit portfolio of their member-base and explore lending opportunities.
my role
When I joined SavvyMoney in 2016, I was the only designer on the team. I started as a UX designer focusing mainly on enhancing the users’ experience with the credit score application. Since then, not only have I grown my role, but also contributed towards creating a strong design culture in the company. I work within the product team, lead a team of designers and UI developers and work closely with the partnerships team to plan and implement enhancements and/or new feature roll-outs. I also wear the business analyst hat and analyze the impact of design interventions and evaluate growth of both product and partners.
design-led product development process
I take pride in working closely with the product team in institutionalizing a product development process which is pro-design, end-to-end. The human-centered design philosophy forms the foundation of the process that instills the idea of technology and design working together for successful releases.
product evolution
When I started, the credit application was limited to the credit score, factors that affect the score, credit monitoring, a page dedicated to the FI's offers and a blog which was largely un-responsive. I have worked on the complete overhaul of the application along with designing additional features.
product snapshopt
A snapshot of the major product releases are described below. Each of these projects followed the product development process while improving upon the process or adding new tools for efficiency.
Credit score, delivered straight to online banking.
Score widget integrated within online banking using iframe solutions and apis.
Introduced notification badge and direct navigation to most used information on the credit application.
New design resulted in 30 fold increase in user engagement.
Responsive components provide flexibilty over widget dimensions.
Live on over 150+ partners across 10+ online banking platforms.
It (score inside online banking) kind of gives me an ongoing goal. This is what my score is and if I see that every time I log in, it kind of gives me some motivation and a little side project to keep improving.
Monitor credit in one place with credit report.
Includes all the credit accounts of users, their details and their payment history, as submitted by lenders to the bureau, in a clean, digestable layout.
Refreshes on every login and shows most recent information, helping users to monitor their reports for errors or potential fraud.
Ability to download a printable version of the report that users can use in financial institution’s branch to clarify any error or negotiate rates.
Used by over 400,000 users to monitor their credit files.
Rollout increased product value and thus, partner buy-in and high ROI.
Personalised offers, pre-approvals and savings calculators.
SavvyMoney is poised to become a marketing partner for financial institutions by helping them in their efforts to run targetted campaigns and advertise their loan offers on the credit application.
Introduced standalone calculators and offer pages per product type - auto loans, credit cards, personal loans, student loans etc.
The offer pages makes it easy to get perosnalised offers and compare them with existing debt, making savings (on refinance/ debt consolidation) apparent and transparent.
Mobile adaptive designs provide easy navigation and access to information across devices and platforms.
The pages had a high usability score (SUS score - 90) and a high net promoter score.
“I really liked that it compared your current loans and the refinanced loan. I liked it showed the monthly savings, interest savings all in one. The page was straightforward, clean, not distracting, and well organized.”
See the impact of your financial decisions with credit score simulator.
Credit score simulator lets users see how the score can be affected by certain events or financial decisions.
New feature roll-out aimed at increasing value to user and ROI for partner financial institutions.
Turn insights into action with SavvyMoney Analytics
Business intelligence tool for partners to analyse their membership, track their engagement on the credit application and explore potential lending opportunities.
Automating user acess and simplifying user on-boarding process
One of the challenges with the user access process was that it was manual and took up to an hour for a user. Also, user sign-up was not real time. From the time user requested access, it could take anywhere from 1-2 business days for them to get access with credential which were not secured.
I re-designed the user access process leveraging the tools that were already being used, to automate the process and making user sign-up realtime. This resulted in a more efficient process saving up to 10-15 hours per month while providing a better user experience.
Making way for design system and accessibility
While working on these design projects, we occassionally ran into the issue of managing assets and design files. One major issue was that same components were not consistent in the design source files. Similar problem co-existed within the dev team too where each new UI developer would re-code the components. This resulted in the designs not only looking different from production but similar components looked different on different pages.
As a solution to the problem, we introduced a component library which helped in mainiting a level on consistency within the design team. But development inconsistency was still a problem. As we transitioned our web technology from angular to react, it gave us an oppotunity to set up the design system that can be used by everyone as a single source of truth. Hence, the birth of,
OCTANE - Design System by SavvyMoney
Though the designs system is still under works, the success of the system lies in the fact that early on dev team recognized the value of the system as they added new UI developers to the projects. They were now seeing reduced development time. This not only helped in spreading awareness about the design system withing teams but get executive buy-in too. Easy!! ;)
ACCESSIBILITY
Since SavvyMoney works directly with financial institutions, some of whom are ADA compliant, it has become implicit for SavvyMoney to be ADA compliant. The design system helped us in taking the first steps towards that. The components being built into the system follow the WCAG 2.0 guidelines with specific focus on color, contrast, target sizes and text guildelines.
