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.
Deploy
Regular handoffs included, designs, prototypes of all flows, annotations and breakpoints. If time permitted we would help do UAT.
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.
Loan Application
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 were 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.
Areas for Improvement
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
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.
New Borrower Registration Flow
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
Login & Registration UI
Pipeline
Problem
The Pipeline is where Account Executives view a snapshot of their ongoing loans and manage their progress.
Account Executives frequently voiced the need for more data in the table, a better understanding of where the loan is at a glance, and improved searching capabilities
Original Pipeline Views
This is not real data
