Scotia BAE Design

Scotiabank business account express purchase flow (BAE) design

For many years, it's not very easy for small business owners to open a business account. They need to make many reservations and bring lots of documents, IDs, and registrations to the branch and wait for ages for the bank to check if they are qualified for loans and credit.

To make this process less painful, Scotiabank decided to create an online express purchase flow for their small business account products so that small business owners could use the self-service system to open business accounts and apply for line of credits wherever they are whenever they want.

Design Challenge

There are many different types of small businesses, they might be qualified for different types of business products. Each product might require different documents and information from users.

Bank needs to verify those personal and business information. But many of those information are from 3rd parties such as the government, credit union, and revenue bureau. It usually takes time to verify those information from 3rd parties because they usually have different systems or operation hours.

It's a big challenge to design a flow that can handle all those different situations.

My role

I was the sole product designer in the pod, working with POs, SMEs, developers and infrastructure engineers to craft the whole purchase flow experience. Starting with research and moving on to flow mapping and iterative product design.

Research

Primary research

Worked with the subject matter experts (SMEs) to conduct preliminary interviews with frontline teams (branch advisors and case workers) to understand the current process to apply for business accounts. I also gathered all the information required for business account applications as well as the painpoints users are currently encounter.

Secondary research

Various forms of secondary research were conducted such as competitive research, industry scan to study the purchase flow within or beyond the financial industry.

I also worked with dev team and infrastructure engineers to study the functions and limitations of the current backend system.

Define products and users

Define type of business

There are many different forms of business, such as sole prop, incorporated, partnership, etc. For the initial BAE flow, business narrowed down the type to support sole prop and incorporated only.

Collect products purchase requirements

There are many choices of business accounts, business credit cards and fastline credit product available for users to apply. The application flow and requirements are various.

With the help from the POs and business, i was able to gather different information and requirements needed to apply for different business products.

Define users and terminologies

Define terminologies for different types of users:
- New new -> New Scotiabank users applying for new business products for the first time.

- Exist new -> Existing Scotiabank users applying for new business products for the first time.

- Exist exist -> Existing Scotiabank business users applying for 2nd or 3rd business products.

Transfer the flow into design

Following Scotiabank style guideline, using standing UI components to create buy flow pages.

Cover all other scenarios

After we have a basic detailed purchase flow, there are other scenarios also need to taking into consideration:

Handle errors

In the purchase process, government registration validation and credit check are relying on 3rd party services. It's possible that 3rd party services might not respond immediately or respond error. So we also designed two error handle flow:

Soft knockout -> If we have technical issues, or if we don't receive responses from 3rd party service therefore we have to temperily pause the flow and ask users to wait until we receive more information. All the process are saved in the system automatically, when we receive the response from 3rd party, we will notify users so that they could come back to pick up from where they left.
Hard knockout -> If users are not qualified for the product or if users didn't pass the credit check, we can't offer the product to the users. Then we have to terminate the flow and notify users the reason why we have to stop.

Entrance point

Users could come from different entrance point, such as directly from .com,

or from online banking (post log-in secure environment),

or from external ads, campaign posters or social media post.

Type of users

As mentioned before, there could be different types of users:

- new new,

- exist new,

- exist exist.

For existing users, we could retrieve their personal information or credit information directly from the bank database system.

Impact

We launched the BAE with 2 initial flows for sole prop and incorporated users.

500 + applications approved

In the first month of launch, we've received more than one thousand applications online and we successfully onboard 500+ new small business clients.

10+ days saved
It used to take 1 - 2 weeks to apply for a business account and even longer for business lines. Now users could finish application in less than 30 mins.

Even though we had a pretty good start. The initial online flow still have lots of problems:

The initial flow only allow sole prop and incorporated business owners to apply. There are many other types of business owner we haven't covered yet;
The successful rate were still very low, we have an average of 30% of successful rate. Most of the appliers were knocked out in the middle of the flow because of different reasons;
In the initial flow, the credit check is at almost the end of the flow, but credit check counts for the most of the knockout cases. Lots of users felt defeated after spending 20 mins to filling in all the information and knocked out by the credit score.

Mapping basic flow

In order to create a general flow that would work for most products, it's easy to start with finding common patterns and overlapped procedures.

1. Card sorting and categorizing

I worked with SMEs to sort different requirements into several groups based on the source of information. Such as personal information, business information, government registration information, personal & business credit information, etc. We found most of the products requires more or less similar information to purchase.

2. Create general purchase flow
Started with a barebone general purchase flow that includes basic steps where most products could fit in.

3. Tailor details based on products' special requirements
Following modular design's principle, I packed the requirements that specified to certain products into different modules that could be easily added-on or removed from the general purchase flow.

4. Break down purchase flow based on system validations

I worked with infrastructure engineers and dev team to decide how information are being evaluated and valided in each module and break down big module into several small sub-modules if necessary.

Future improvement

Even though we had a pretty good start. The initial online flow still have lots of problems:

The initial flow only allow sole prop and incorporated business owners to apply. There are many other types of business owner we haven't covered yet;
The successful rate were still very low, we have an average of 30% of successful rate. Most of the appliers were knocked out in the middle of the flow because of different reasons;
In the initial flow, the credit check is at almost the end of the flow, but credit check counts for the most of the knockout cases. Lots of users felt defeated after spending 20 mins to filling in all the information and knocked out by the credit score.