EY's First White Label Solution for AML Monitoring

Context

Financial crimes, accounting for $1-3 trillion in global activity annually, are challenging to detect, with less than 1% identified. Know Your Customer (KYC) is a crucial process used by financial institutions to verify customer identities and monitor transactions, aiming to combat money laundering and financial crimes. Non-compliance with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and KYC regulations has led to $26 billion in fines in the past decade.

My Role

I served as a senior designer, collaborating with a team of designers and developers for 10 months. Led UI/UX for the team lead flow and dashboard, accountable to three stakeholder groups: FinCrime Compliance Technology partners, engineering leadership, and design studio leadership.

I worked in the Waterfall methodology by researching, creating user flows, holding stakeholder ideation sessions, wireframing, prototyping, and conducting user testing with EY KYC analysts.

The Challenge

Despite significant investments in AML and KYC compliance, most financial institutions faced slow, error-prone manual processes due to a lack of suitable software. KYC Analysts operated with fragmented workflows, scattered documentation, and no centralized compliance solution. Our mission was to create user-friendly software that streamlined documentation, automated low-value tasks, and enabled transparent, collaborative workflows for Analysts and Team Leads.

The Opportunity

EY recognized the significance of AML and KYC compliance and developed a white-label Case Management Tool as a proof of concept. This tool underwent a trial at a client site, with the plan to white-label it for potential clients, marking EY's initial internal software build used as an MVP by a client.

Process

Whiteboarding sessions with KYC Analysts and SMEs informed digital prototypes. User testing and stakeholder reviews refined the design. I regularly reviewed my work with developers to ensure the solution was feasible to build.

User Needs & Issues

Disjointed Workflow: KYC Analysts faced a manual, error-prone and disorganized workflow with scattered documentation

Oversight & Context for Cases: An audit trail for reguarly compliance and case context were critical for users

Customer Data Consolidation: A single repository for customer data was vital for workflow management, record-keeping, and documentation collection.

User Research

Focus Groups: held with EY KYC analysts to empathize with their pain points and processes.

Stakeholder Workshops: Conducted with internal stakeholders in the Financial Crimes Compliance Technology practice to gather business requirements.

Ethnographic Research: Observed EY KYC analysts' manual case management process.

SME (subject matter expert) Ideation Sessions: Collaborated with EY SMEs for competitive analysis and additional business requirements.

Competitive Analysis: Identified Actimize and Pega as significant players in the Case Management Tool space.

Research Impact:

Focus groups with KYC Analysts illuminated manual procedures, scattered documentation, and a process prone to human error. The solution aimed to automate this low-value manual work, streamline documentation collection, and enhance transparency and collaboration.

Current Site Audit

When starting the project, I began with an audit of the current site to understand the elements and content on each page. My first exercise was to get an understanding of the information architecture.

The IA exercise was fruitful because the News/Events page immediately caught my interest. The news container was an accordion with over 95 entries (see IA detail below). The video shows what the current UX of the News portion is like.

The accordion format is difficult to navigate. It contains the most content on the page and is the most frequently updated, yet has the most limited screen real estate.

Pain points:

Element causes user to have to initiate action to read the content.
Container within page causes a double scroll.
The news section does not tell the user how many entries are in the container.
Some entries are time-sensitive and are no longer relevant after the event has passed.

Current State of the News Page:

Events Banner

Thought Pieces

News Archive

After I completed an audit, I decided to do a competitive analysis for the news page. There were limitations in regards to user contact, research, and analytics for the marketing site. I worked within these constraints by generating ideas and understand best practices for other online archives. No metrics, testing, research, or heat mapping existed to get insight into user behavior, so this seemed like the best approach.

Pew Research News Archive

Discovery

Common Elements: category tabs, article previews, pagination, pill filters, date/topic filters, photos

Pfizer Press Release Archive

Apple News Archive

Iterations

Next, I incorporated my learnings from the competitive analysis in the design iterations. I decided to give the News Archive much more real estate while still highlighting PricingDirect's thought pieces.

First Iteration

Category tabs

Pill filter

Pagination

Container featuring latest entry for each news category

Date filters for years & months

Keyword search

Article preview

Second Iteration

Category icons

See More Content CTA

Photos for featured posts

Simplified date filter

3 column grid format from J.P. Morgan branding guidelines

Back to top button for easy browsing

Design Decisions

Iterative changes: 

Used components from the JPM brand guidelines that were more easily able to be implemented by technology. 
Decided that the title and icon approach was better than the category filter pills because a tab mechanism exists at the top of the news archive and it was a redundancy. 
Card format was a brand standard from J.P. Morgan for marketing sites
- More visually compelling than a list and gives the news page an editorial look and feel.
- Prevents information overload & incorporates space for imagery 
See More CTA & back to top button change
- pagination has potential to be overwhelming with a lot of news entries 
Added a request a trial CTA on article pages to increase sales funnel.

Results & Outcomes

I implemented a new, more browsable layout for the news page to clearly highlight PricingDirect’s different pieces of content.
- As a result, the business is better equipped to publish their backlog of thought pieces and establish their thought leadership. 
I established a sustainable practice with the technology team of implementing the JPM marketing site brand standards going forward.
Along with brand standards, the technology team implemented a web content management system so the business team can create new news content themselves with ease.