Finix is a payments startup that provides tech-enabled businesses with embedded payment processing services via APIs. Before a business can embed payments, they must be get underwriting approval (KYB / KYC). If a business has merchants (e.g. the SaaS customers of a Finix customer), the merchants must complete onboarding forms for underwriting approval. The Finix underwriting team uses an internal interface that never evolved beyond the first iteration; onboarding form and third-party reporting data was simply dumped on a multi-tabbed page and since it was hard for underwriters to make sense of the data, the underwriting process took longer than needed.
Streamlined underwriting experience
Before:
- Submitted merchant data was spread across multiple tabs, displayed based off of the API structure, and not organized based on underwriting workflows
- Experience was "designed" by product/engineering (when there was no design team) without underwriting involvement and remained untouched since the first iteration
- Underwriters didn't trust the data because it wasn't presented in a user-friendly way and therefore relied on a lot of manual work to make decisions
After:
- Streamlined experience after working with the underwriting team to learn about their workflows and pain points, and hear their feedback.
- While there were still engineering constraints that limited what could be shown, the underwriting team was very happy with the new experience.
- The information they needed to make a decison was all in one place and related data was grouped together.
Impact:
- Collaboration between underwriters and PDE improved going forward because I built the trust and working relationship.
- Underwriters were able to make quicker decisions and cut underwriting processing time by at least 50%.
- This was the initial update that allowed PDE to add additional reports, new functionality, and automation to the underwriting experience. Eventually, this underwriting product also became available as a standalone product for Finix customers.