Smartbiz Loans
Senior Product Designer
2020-2023
Overview
Smartbiz is a mission-driven fintech that helps underserved small businesses access financial capital. The multi-sided business consists of an online lending marketplace with a guided application flow for borrowers, in addition to underwriting and packaging services for banks.
I first worked with the company as a contractor in 2019. During that time, my focus was on borrower-facing projects, but I quickly grew fascinated by the complexity happening behind the scenes. The internal loan origination system was super slow and outdated, with so much opportunity for design to have an impact. So when I had the chance to join Smartbiz full-time in 2020 to work on the backend experience, I was thrilled.
As a Senior Product Designer, I was responsible for improving the loan processing experience for internal reps and bank users. I owned the end-to-end design process for several new workflow tools that helped to streamline and scale high-friction areas.
Projects
Credit Assistant
A major source of friction for the banks was the credit memo—a document containing key details about the loan and borrowing business—which involved a lot of manual work, redundant tasks and back and forth to prepare.
I was tasked with improving the credit memo experience, from preparation and approval to the final output. This meant identifying opportunities to streamline and standardize the work for the internal team, while ensuring everything still met the needs and regulatory standards of the banks. Through a series of design-led discovery activities, I uncovered key issues with the existing process, explored and validated concepts for the ideal future state, and aligned both sides around a high-level vision. I partnered with product and engineering to define and build an entirely new credit memo experience from the ground up.
The Credit Assistant combined application data and notes into a shared canvas that established a source of truth between internal and bank users, and increased productivity on both sides.
Loan Validation Assistant
During the pandemic, the business had shifted its focus from traditional SMB loans to Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans — a government funded relief effort to help keep small businesses open. While the application process for PPP loans was a lot lighter in terms of requirements, we were receiving a much higher volume of loans than the business was used to or prepared for. The operations team wanted to automate the loan review process as much possible in order to keep up with the demand.
Data & engineering had started experimenting with AI and machine learning models to extract and interpret customer inputs and documents. They built a new interface to display all the data checks and calculations, but it was more confusing than helpful for reps to use in their day-to-day workflows. I partnered with product and engineering to learn about the existing tool and identify opportunities to better align it with the immediate needs of our reps. We developed a proof of concept and worked closely with the operations team to test, iterate and integrate it into the PPP loan review process.
The Loan Validation Assistant presented applicant data and documents in a side-by-side layout for easy comparison, and introduced automated checks and insights to help reps make faster decisions with higher confidence. It became a central part of the PPP loan review process, and enabled the operations team to quickly scale to meet their goals.
Closing Assistant
After the Loan Validation Assistant enabled internal reps to review PPP applications more efficiently, loans began moving through the funnel so quickly that it began to overwhelm the closing team. I joined an ad hoc, cross-functional group to audit the existing closing process and explore ways to streamline and automate key tasks. We found that closers were spending a lot of time shuffling between different views and docs to hunt down key eligibility info, and keeping track of everything in spreadsheets. It was also taking them around 10 minutes per loan to get through the closing flow, which was painfully slow.
In under 2 weeks, my team developed the Closing Assistant—a stand-alone tool that consolidated the entire closing process into two screens. The Data Validation screen was a dynamic list of eligibility requirements, powered by a rules engine. It automatically checked for the correct data in the system, so closers could ditch their spreadsheets. The Closing Actions screen automated each closing task with the click of a button, so they could skip all the unnecessary clicks and slow load times. With a status for every item, there was no more confusion around what was in need of review or still needed to be done.
The solution was quick and simple, but proved really effective for the closing team. Loans without any major issues could now be closed in less than 2 minutes, and the team was able to get through tens of thousands of loans each week.
By the end of PPP, Smartbiz had helped secure funds for over 200,000 SMBs.