UX Design - Simplifying the Loan Approval Process

In addition to my duties on my day-to-day agile team, in Fall 2020 I inherited design lead duties on a cross-functional committee that was responsible for conceptualizing parts of the loan processing ecosystem that had not yet been explored.

Essentially, all parts of the underwriting process had fallen by the wayside when the agile teams working on new digital capabilities were set up. This cross-functional committee was established to explore the deltas and start coming up with ideas that future agile teams could take and run with. This undertaking was daunting, to say the least, and involved several meetings a week featuring the voices of multiple product owners.

At the point where I inherited the project, a lot of exploration had occurred in Mural, and some lo-fi wireframes had begun to be created. However, the last part of the underwriting process, which is the approval of the loan so it can move forward and be funded, had not yet been explored. To me, this Summary / Approval area was one of the most critical points in the process, as it represents the ultimate goal of the analysis performed by the underwriter.

The current process for approval involves the underwriter generating a 40+ page document from a legacy system, manually updating some content in the Word document that is exported, then PDFing that document and emailing it to their supervisor. The supervisor then has to review that PDF, usually on an iPad during his/her downtime, use a tool to mark it up with comments, and email it back to the underwriter for any comments to be addressed. The cycle continues until the loan is ready to be approved.

Working with stakeholders, I identified the most important data points from the massive PDF that could appear on a Summary screen to make the approver’s life easier. Because we had captured feedback directly in Mural, it was incredibly easy to create an initial draft of the lo-fi wireframe in the same tool so we could refer back to our stickies and comments and make sure all the data was included and in the right place.