Scaling the asset finance service sustainably

Enabling customers to acquire business critical assets right when they need it, time and time again

Photo by Darla Hueske on Unsplash

The challenge

Business needs

A key business goal at Shawbrook Bank was to grow the lending portfolio by standing above competitors and being the go to place for asset finance. By providing flexible and tailored business finance solutions along with digital processing of simple transactions and access to human expertise for more complex requirements, the bank aimed to set itself apart by serving customers with what they need.

User needs

For customers to use Shawbrook continually for their finance needs, they needed the bank to be flexible to meet their individual needs, plus deliver a smooth experience from application to payout.

For colleagues delivering the service, the pressures of big targets and volumes of customers added pressure and teams were unsure how the service would be able to support and deliver on these with current systems and processes. To add to this, the variety and complexity in assets to be financed, meant that more time was often needed on certain applications and not others, however that time was taken up with processing more simpler cases.

Our goal

In order to enable growth in a sustainable and scalable way, our challenge was to generate a shared understanding of the current asset finance service with challenges and opportunities identified to deliver an improved future experience that would meet customers, colleagues and business needs.

What we did

Discovery

To identify needs of the piece of work and area of the business we spent a lot of time planning the approach we would take to achieve our goal. I did this by interviewing key stakeholders in the team. I then started mapping out key activities and educating the product squad on what the activities were and the value to gain from them.

We started to plan who we needed to speak to across the service to learn more about it. As there was many teams delivering this service, I started by getting a high level view of each team and their role in the service by having introduction calls with each team leader. I then went on to speak to individuals in each team with a better understanding of their role in the service to enable me to ask better more specific questions. To help manage and track the all of the interview sessions, I formed a calendar view plan and table and made this visible for the project team, so they could plan joining sessions and they could provide updates to stakeholders on where we were at with our discovery.

Gathering insights

To understand more about the users of the service, I conducted multiple interviews and observations with team leads and team members across the service to understand their daily tasks, any barriers or challenges and needs. I did this both in person and remotely.

We used consistent discussion guides with questions about each individual and then followed this will questions about their daily tasks. To help with the conversation about their involvement with the service, I created a high level end to end map of the service to prompt conversation and validate our initial understanding of the service.

Whilst I focused on understanding our colleagues, our user researcher conducted research with brokers, to better understand their experience with the bank and also our customers experience through the broker.

I started to document insights by rewatching each recording, taking down verbatim to refer back to when evidencing insights and pulling out key themes. Although conversations mainly centred around the systems and processes within the service, through sessions I was also able to understand operational challenges and impacts on staff mental health due to heavy workloads and pressure. Without doing this level of interviews, I wouldn't have been able to fully understand the real impacts the current service was driving.

To visualise and make sense of the insights from interviews, I built empathy maps & journey maps for each team and their part of the service. These made it easy to digest an abundance of insights. These artefacts were also referenced throughout the project, to ensure when designing we were meeting needs of people in the service.

From the journey maps, I was able to connect each experience to build the as is service blueprint. Collaboratively with the core team, we talked through the customer, broker and colleague experiences and joined up where they connected in the experience. We talked through key touch points between customer and colleague and also where technology was delivering the service instead of a human.

By piecing together the people, process and technology of the service, we were able to do even more analysis of the service as a whole. On the blueprint, I identified where an activity at the start of the service was heavily impacting the middle and also the end of the service, putting a huge strain on teams working in these areas. Without having the blueprint to connect the experiences, we would have missed this and relied on assumptions from team leaders that the issue was the team and issues with technology.

Making sense of insights

To help with analysing the service, I pulled together all challenges, processes and opportunities that had come from all interviews and started to identify themes. Moving into synthesis, I started to take the themes and build out the impact of each theme on the whole service.

What we learnt

Across the end to end service, we identified that

• There was unnecessary manual processing across multiple systems

• Missing information, policy interpretations and multiple handoffs was delaying the process

• Lack of standardisation led to the same amount of time being spent on every deal, even simple deals

• There was concern across all teams that increased volumes, without substantial change would further impact teams

This meant that...

• The service was not scalable and wouldn't be able to grow sustainably

• Volumes increasing would exacerbate existing issues

• The bank would not be unable to offer a market leading propositions

• The bank would not only limit future deals but existing deals too

Define

Defining the problems to be solved

Once we had done service analysis, we needed to share what we had learnt with the stakeholders involved in the service. I did this by tidying up our analysis boards and creating an analysis presentation pack. In the pack, I included the process of how we discovered the insights, what the insights were and what we would do with the insights. We played this pack to multiple stakeholders in various sessions to communicate what we had learnt. The sessions helped to bring shared visibility and understanding of the service to all stakeholder groups and highlighted even more connections across operations and leadership. The sessions also helped to prioritise problems to focus on first.

When playing back to the wider Product function, we also identified that there were multiple shared insights and opportunities with another project at the bank. This led to us working together going forward to align work across the two business areas and solve problems collaboratively.

Design

Designing the target state concept

After playing back what we had learnt, we started to co-design with stakeholders and users of the service on collaboratively solving problems across the end to end. Many had ideas to solve the problems in their area and had already tried to implement some changes. Our job was to expand on these and encourage stakeholders to think more holistically about their solutions. As an example, many stakeholders felt that if they could buy more technology it would solve all the problems, however although we agreed that technology would help, if not implemented correctly it could cause more problems, as we had seen through discovery.

Through stakeholder workshops, we encouraged stakeholders to think of comparable services with great experiences and asked them to break these down into what makes them great experiences. We then enabled ideation by challenging stakeholders to come up with solutions by answering problem statements that we had identified through full service analysis, instead of solving problems in silos.

The overall ideas generated focused on auto decisioning simple deals, so that colleagues could spend their time and expertise on more complex deals. Other ideas included operational improvements and more flexible policies.

Post the sessions, we had gathered an abundance of ideas to consider when moving into designing the target state service.

Target state mapping

With problems to solve across the end to end, I led the design of the target state service. During a workshop, we started by defining the optimum customer experience, we considered their needs of getting decision as quickly as possible to get the assets they need for their business. As customers often come through brokers, brokers were a secondary customer, so we needed to connect in their experience. We mapped key touch points that would meet both customer and colleagues needs, for example, using data sources to populate application forms instead of brokers having to gather lots of information and spend time completing forms for a decision that might not even be right for the customer.

Once we had the customer and broker experience mapped, we then mapped how the service will be delivered using technology, colleague expertise and processes. For example, we defined all the data points needed for an auto decision and defined where we could get the data from. Post the auto decisioning, we also mapped how the system would auto generate conditions that would be needed to complete the deal fully, removing the need for manual, human intervention and interpretation which currently slowed the process down.

Overall we had designed a service that involved auto decisioning of simple deals to get customers an agreement and payout of their loan quicker, enabling colleagues to focus on more complex, larger deals which needed more bespoke underwriting.

To bring to life the service we had designed to validate with the stakeholders, I created an end to end storyboard of the service. In the storyboard, I illustrated the customer, broker and colleague experiences, with supporting technology. On the storyboard, I also highlighted the improvements we had made in the service and what problem it was removing.

Delivery

After validating the target service with stakeholders, the next step was to plan how to deliver the improved service. To start, we took all the opportunities in the target service and created an opportunity map. This helped to see where all the opportunities sat across the service and develop and see solutions that solve multiple problems in one place. By reviewing the opportunity map collaboratively we identified where to start adding value and where more strategic pieces of work would be.

As an example, the current service used a basic auto decisioning feature which only utilised certain data points. Therefore, we identified that if we build into this feature to capture all data points we had defined in the target state, we could start to add value to the service by improving decisioning. We could also test this concept by making changes to the current system, learning and iterating.

Product used the target state mapping and the opportunity map to help build out a roadmap of opportunities to work through over the next few quarters. From beginning with quick wins to enhance the auto decisioning on simple deals to later focusing on more strategic initiatives like operational efficiencies and improved customer experience. The target state mapping not only fed the build of the roadmap, it also fed the development of each new feature in the service, by taking a holistic approach to delivering improvments that considered all areas of the service.

Outcomes

What the discovery delivered for the bank

With huge targets to achieve, the current service needed to change. The change that was needed wasn't simply improved technology, but it also included the people and processes involved in delivering the service. By bringing a shared understanding of the current service, we enabled teams across the service to build empathy between each other and work together to define a service that mets goals together, instead of in silos.

The target state mapping and storyboard drove the roadmap, which all stakeholders endorsed to deliver an improved service. Without the service design approach, the service would have remained with it's challenges and with increased volumes it would have been put under more pressure to deliver. The approach also enabled teams to see things more holistically and to consider how even small changes might impact the service. Overall, the approach led to a roadmap that would deliver the change the service (and all parties involved) needed.

To bring this to life, since making changes to the service from the roadmap, the service has enabled the business to achieve a key milestone.

"We have now funded £100m in asset finance transactions underpinned by auto-decisioning, with deals that are not auto-accepted being passed to an expert within the team to review. Well done to everyone involved in the continuous enhancement of this service and all the teams behind the scenes that have made this milestone possible."