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Civic Financial Services
Overview
CIVIC Financial Services is a private money lender, specializing in the financing of non-owner occupied residential investment properties.
Challenge
Identify and build the essential features our Account Executives need from an ancient software called Encompass, and build them into a new lightweight responsive product to originate and process a high volume of loans.
TEam
Civic had a creative development department of about 30 people and consisted of a product owner, four product managers, two designers, a head of technology, twelve developers, and four QA engineers.
We operated on an agile sprint cycle deploying about every two weeks.
Role
Define
Product managers would come to the design team with a problem and a rough feature defined. We would then interview stakeholders to gather the detailed requirements, define the problem and outline a solution using flows, sitemaps, user stories, product inventories, etc.
Design
Once our concepts were validated with the stakeholders and reviewed with our tech team we began designing in Figma.
Regular handoffs included, designs, prototypes of all flows, annotations and breakpoints. If time permitted we would help do UAT.
Deploy
Audience
Our AEs spent their day quoting, pricing, adjusting, and selling loans. They managed and monitored several loans per day in different stages of the loans lifecycle.
Account Executives
Borrowers had the option to be very involved with the loan origination process or have the AE lead the process and do it for them.
Borrowers
Much like the role of the AE, but brokers had an additional layer to add their own price into the pricing engine.
brokers
Correspondent
Correspondent partners would use O8 as a white labeled, custom branded platform.
Problem
One of the companies biggest pain points was the loan application. When I joined, there was a short application and a long application. It was too long or not enough information.
We also had a high volume of paper applications that has consistently missing information. This meant AEs were inputting this information in the system and calling borrowers for the rest of it.
Repeat borrowers had to enter the same information again, which was time consuming.
Solutions
Create an application flow with only lead data
Create a new borrower registration flow
Create a repeat borrower flow
Address the log in and register process
Create borrower account management and give borrowers easier access to their personal information.
User Flows
Registration Flow for external users
Loan Intake
Creating this flow helped us uncover the need for a better log in, sign up and password reset flows and broker and correspondent application processes.
AE and Repeat Borrower Start Application Flow
Initially, we only addressed the repeat data, shown below, but then we realized we could leverage some of the systems features later in the process up front.
Second Iteration of AE/Repeat Borrower Application Flow
If a borrower is brand new, validating the borrower’s experience and real estate schedule happen later in the application stage. If we were able to leverage the existing information about the borrower in intake we could give them a more accurate price at the end of the intake. We could also eliminate several steps in the application.
Registration Prototype
Pipeline
This is where Account Executives would look at the full picture of all the loans the were managing.
This is not real data
Evaluate
Through our internal request system, we received complaints that AEs needed more information about the loan and it was hard to organize.
Interviews
Through many AE interviews we learned that they needed additional functions and different ways to “view” data.
NEw Features
Comparitive analysys
AEs were used to using Encompass, so I looked at all the data points Encompass had and wanted to know which ones were the most useful to bring over into O8
Condensed Navigation because it was taking up too much space. We also applied the new branding
Gave users the ability to start a new loan to add to the pipeline
Gave users a way to view their loans in each of the major stages of the loan
Chose to use one search function instead of per column to save space. There were some technical limitations to how this funcitoned.
Survey
I sent a survey to under 200 AEs and asked them to rank which data points were the most valuable to see on the pipeline. We added the highest ranked data.
5. Gave users the ability to filter based on categories
6. Added a table and card view. The pipeline was too compact and difficult to read. We went with responsive cards to make it easy on mobile too.
7. Added sorting rules
8. The pipeline could have thousands of loans depending on a users role, we had to add pagination, lazy load would have also worked
Results
The Pipeline was a constant work in progress. Updating the data and views gave users more flexibility to viewing loans. My next step with this feature would be to offer data and column customization. We also were evaluating how to include a third kanban view. And lastly adding direct links to broker company profiles and borrower profiles.