Commercial Real Estate Lending
I built a digital platform for the nation’s leading multifamily lender.
In 2019, the Firm began a multi-year journey to digitize the Commercial Bank’s commercial real estate lending origination process via a consumer-facing platform that:
facilitates secure document and data exchange;
centralizes communication between clients and the internal teams, including sales, underwriting, and processing;
aims to reduce closing times from 4 weeks to 14 days
What was my role?
I lead the design strategy and execution for commercial lending originations
The core team includes a user research lead, a content strategist, and 2 senior designers along with 2 scrum teams, 2 product owners, and a product lead. We currently work within 2 work-streams:
a strategic one that continuously develops and iterates a long-term best-in-class “North Star” for commercial real estate lending;
a tactical, near-term one that integrates key features from the “North Star” into delivery and implementation based on roadmap prioritization and user feedback
What did success look like?
Originate 300+ loans by Q1 2021
Reduce closing time to <21 days
80%+ client adoption in target state
How did we start?
We re-aligned the journey with the broader design strategy
The core team analyzed a set of design deliverables issued by an internal consultancy and examined them against the Firm’s larger customer experience strategy.
We helped the extended teams internalize the broader customer experience strategies at play by producing own customer journey maps that hybridized the previous team’s concepts with the Firm’s point of view.
We also produced high-level conceptual solutions and supplemental user flows to satisfy more detail-oriented stakeholders.
We examined competitor experiences and workshopped solutions
The team got buy-in from Product and Business stakeholders by leading workshops focusing on rapid sketching and affinity diagramming. We considered the needs of loan origination clients as well as those of internal service professionals who may be impacted by customer-facing optimizations.
We simultaneously audited loan origination experiences within the Firm’s ecosystem, at competing banks, and FinTech startups to identify key features of a “best in-class” origination. These included:
Ability to quickly gauge status and if action is needed;
Multichannel collaboration;
Transparency into end-to-end process;
Focused on one question or request at a time;
Clear distinction between forms and document management
We built a prototype and put it in front of real clients.
I worked closely with the team’s Research Lead to devise the scenario that would be represented in the research prototype to validate our North Star
The team along with Product helped define the questions we were seeking answers to in our research sessions. Some of these questions included:
Do users understand where they are in the global application process?
Can users quickly see whether any items require action?
Do users have the information they need to assess open items and take action?
Is collaboration with the Sales team easy and effective?
Who were we solving for?
Design + Research crafted these personas to help inform our process and decision-making.
Jane Bellows
A young, more hands-on entrepreneur who hopes to increase and diversify her real estate portfolio by acquiring additional properties
Jane represents the Firm’s long-term target: new-to-bank clients seeking competitive purchase loans
Bill Smith
A seasoned real estate professional with a diverse portfolio and a small staff who help him oversee his properties and their associated treasury services
Bill reflects the Firm’s current client base, who often seek to refinance existing commercial term loans
The North Star, at a Glance
We focused on the origination journey for a refinance loan for an existing client
Phase 1: Linear Journey
A sequence of screens that leverages the existing account opening framework to capture and surface client data
Phase 2: Cyclical Sequence
A task-oriented dashboard where clients are expected to visit periodically to upload documentation and verify information to determine their eligibility for credit.
What did our clients think?“This is great! It speeds things up. I can do it anytime!”
— Simon, a “Bill” Client
Key research takeaways
Simplify document exchange
Scale down certain document exchange related features (i.e. version control, commenting, in-line preview) to make the interface simpler and retain context of the Application Tracker
Make statuses reflect clients’ workflows
Empower users when completing tasks by simplifying individual task statuses to “open” and “complete” rather than organizing them by subject area or the internal review cycle
Transparency into appraisal + insurance
Clients are actively wanting more visibility and transparency into the appraisal process: they want to know who the appraiser will be, and the estimates along with any associated reports
What did next steps look like?
Work with business architects to develop an appraisal and insurance module to provide clients with transparency into these areas of the loan origination;
Scale the experience to accommodate more complex transactions (multi-borrower, multi-entity, concurrent applications) within the linear form-driven experience and cyclical task-driven journey;
Expand our “North Star” to account for on-boarding, servicing, and shopping to optimize the lending transaction’s entire lifecycle;
Develop broader design strategy to standardize lending experience across all customer journeys