top of page

Know Your Customer: Case Management Tool

Application Ideation and Design

A user friendly, web-based case management tool that helps analysts at Financial Institutions track customer onboarding and scheduled refreshes of accounts while automating previously manual work.

Fincrime website image_edited.jpg
lady persona.png

My role: UX/UI Design & Research

calendar icon.png

Project Length: 10 months

tools.png

Tools: Sketch, InVision

Financial Crimes
Are Hard to Track

  • Financial crime accounts for $1-3 trillion in annual global activity, yet less than 1% is actually detected

Know Your Customer

  • KYC or “Know Your Customer” is a process used by financial institutions and businesses to verify the identity of customers and monitor their transactions.
     

  • KYC was designed to protect banks and companies from money laundering and other financial crimes.

FINANCIAL CRIMES ARE COSTLY

  • $26 billion in fines has been imposed for non-compliance with Anti-Money Laundering (AML), KYC protocols, and sections regulations in the last decade

CASE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE IS NECESSARY

  • A recent industry survey found that only 40% of businesses have a KYC Case Management Tool (CMT) in place — leaving a majority to rely on other, more human-error prone methods.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Because AML and KYC compliance is of such high importance to Financial Institutions, EY decided to design and build a Case Management Tool as a proof of concept to launch for a trial period at a Financial Institution client site. The goal of this software was to whitelabel the solution and sell it as an offering to other clients. This was the first internal EY software build to be used as an MVP by a client. 

THE CHALLENGE

Financial institutions and businesses spend a lot of time and resources ensuring they comply with KYC and AML regulations, yet most do not have a software solution in place to help make this happen. Existing tools and processes in this realm are typically slow, disparate, manual, and regularly prone to human errors. 

My team’s ask was to design and develop a user friendly solution that automated low-value manual work, streamlined documentation collection, and showed a transparent, collaborative workflow. Cases needed to be accessed by Analysts and Team Leads for full transparency. The MVP build needed to streamline the experience for working and reviewing cases.

OUTCOMES

The KYC case management tool was deployed at a client site for a trial period. The client did not sign on. I learned a lot from this project, as it was my first complex design solution. It taught me a lot about working with stakeholders, project management, and building relationships with cross-functional colleagues. If I could do this project again, I would spend more time interviewing users, testing, and iterating. I think the solution was decent, but it was more focused on features than usability.

The Team

I was on a team with 1 other senior designer, 2 junior designers, and led by a design lead. The product team had two members that gathered requirements from 3 subject matter experts and 2 senior stakeholders. The development team was a full stack dev team with 3 backend developers, 3 frontend developers, and 2 DevOps engineers. 

RESEARCH

Competitive Analysis

  • I conducted research into other CMTs and found Actimize and Pega as the big players in the space

Focus Groups

  • The product and design teams held focus groups with KYC Analysts on FinCrime engagements to understand pain points and needs.

SME Interviews

  • The design team worked with Subject Matter Experts to gain understanding of the space and get demos of competitive software in the marketplace.

RESEARCH IMPACT

The most insightful research method was conducting focus groups with KYC Analysts at EY who were working on FinCrime projects. From this, I was able to better understand the existing processes being used at various Financial Institutions. We also determined that the Analyst was the main persona we were desigining for.

What we found was a lot of manual procedures, scattered documentation, and an overall process prone to human error. The biggest problem we encountered was that consultants and employees alike used siloed sources - like Excel sheets, Word documents, PDFs, emails, shared drives, and notes from phone calls. Our solution would need to automate low-value manual work, streamline documentation collection, and show a transparent and collaborative workflow.

PROCESS

Low Fidelity

After doing an initial round of whiteboarding in a joint session with KYC Analysts and SMEs, I iterated on the whiteboard sketches and moved into digital prototypes. I primarily worked on the user flow for the KYC Analyst.

ANALYST USER FLOW

ANALYST USER FLOW.png

Wireframes

Please click on the gallery to see detailed descriptions of each page

Medium Fidelity User Flow Details

Medium Fidelity User Flow.png

HIGH Fidelity

A few stylistic changes were made between the wireframes and the high fidelity prototypes. Through reviews with stakeholders and a few rounds of user testing, some elements moved or were added. We worked with a graphic designer at the EY Design Studio to come up with a overarching aesthetic for the application. The style was loosely based off of Material Design components, but was customized for our usecase.

Please click on the gallery to see detailed descriptions of each page

bottom of page