Financial Operations Tool
Funding Circle needed a financial operations application and an out of a box solution was not available to support our business model and specific FinTech regulatory requirements.
This was one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever done. I had no prior knowledge of accounting and the engineering team was venturing into new technology. With lot of ambiguity designing a new product, I decided to focus my design strategy on user needs but also keep focus on business requirements.
Business requirements were:
Accuracy
Speed
Automation
Scalability
Most importantly having a single source truth for money movements
Version 1
Role: Product Design Director
Challenges:
Converting a very manual process using excel into a web based environment
Changing user behavior
Trusting an automated process
Trusting the accuracies
Trusting new technology
Exploring areas of innovation but staying within the boundaries of regulatory requirements
Design Process
Research
Interviewed and shadowed internal financial operations teams.
Identified key themes of user requirements:
Able to create different views of data from macro to micro analysis
Speed
Accuracy
Exception based triaging
Ease of use
Efficient
Moderated user feedback
I relied very heavily on user feedback in every stage of design. The manual process was very comprehensive therefore every presentation of the data needed to be vetted for accuracy and comprehension. We were using new technology Closure and it came with ambiguity. The engineers didn’t have a clear sense of how the data would perform. I decided to focus on user needs and collaborated often with engineers during wire framing sessions. Luckily the users were in house which made a very efficient process.
