Enabling New Deals through Modernized UX
A reimagined experience to bring a legacy correspondent lending platform to the modern age leading to seven-figure deals with major banking chains.
TL;DR
THE OUTCOME
A modernized user experience to enable our client’s customers to easily manage and process more loans through their platform, resulting in them closing a figure deal with major a US commercial bank.
THE OPPORTUNITY
How might a leader in the mortgage and banking technology space upgrade their legacy digital correspondent lending platform to stay ahead of their competition?
The Problem
Originate’s client, a premier provider of high-performance software, data, and analytics solutions for the mortgage, real estate, and capital markets industries, had recently acquired an AI mortgage documentation verification startup to improve the due diligence process of its corresponding lending platform. This advancement in technology led to the client investing in re-designing their existing legacy corresponding lending platform to stay ahead of the competition and to court potential seven-figure deals with commercial banks.
My Impact
As the Lead Product Designer on the team at Originate
People
Facilitated workshops with the internal team, client stakeholders, and SMEs to build alignment on problem space and co-create solutions. Educated clients in human-centered design practices to improve existing processes
Process
Hands-on design lead, creating development-ready designs for client and internal development teams.
Lead engaging demo sessions to sell proof of concept to potential banking customers, helping secure a seven-figure deal.
Practice
Produced high-quality designs to illustrate the intended user experience, responding to new client input and feedback throughout the design process.
The Approach
Building Alignment Through Concept Sprint
At the start of the engagement, I kicked off a week-long concept sprint with our internal team, internal stakeholders, and subject matter experts on the client’s side to understand the life cycle of a loan through the correspondent selling process. Through this sprint, we were able to identify key players on both the bank and seller’s side and the points that regularly occurred during the process on the current platform. These findings enabled the team to quickly immerse themselves in the space, and develop principles for our new solution.
Simplifying the Complex
From the workshop, we uncovered that the number of steps to complete, and submit a single loan was often inefficient, prolonging the sale of loans, due to errors in document management, and the manual overhead required. Communication between the seller and the purchasing bank was not documented in a central location, leading to redundancies and miscommunications, further delaying sales. We created a streamlined process that minimized back-and-forth between both parties.
Designing for Focus
I designed a User Experience that enabled the user to easily manage their loan pipeline, focusing on the scalability of key details to bring focus to the most pressing needs.The UI of the platform was modernized to align with best practices and standards, as well as enable reconfigurability to a customer’s brand.
The updated loan pipeline enabled users to focus in on their most pressing issues and prevent deals from timing out. The AI document scan streamlined the due diligence process, preventing delays from errors throughout the process. Loan management could be done within one view, allowing the user to quickly complete tasks, and move onto other loans in the pipeline,
The Commitments flow reduced the amount of steps required to allocate purchased loans to specific accounts. Bulk actions enabled users to quickly add new loans and contracts,
Outcome
Secured a Seven-Figure Deal With the National Bank
The demo of the MVP was shopped to several national, and regional banks resulting in new contracts. The first release functioned as a stepping stone to integrate their newly acquired AI startup’s software into the future platform.