Launching a New Line-of-Business at Scale to Earn $750K+ Net Income Per Week

Enabling a new line of business by delivering an experience with multiple customer-facing and lender-facing platforms – in 6 months.

A Modern Banking Challenge

We had always been a bank that catered to small business needs. The SBA requires approval of each loan they backed, so the speed at which the lending process moved was glacial. The labor involved in getting each loan approved was significantly higher than more conventional forms of lending, and our bank filled a niche that was not profitable enough for bigger banks to touch.

The loan dashboard is displayed after a customer is routed to the correct application.

Once-in-a-Career Opportunity

The loan details provide a quick snapshot of the reasons for a loan, and is capable of making a nearly instantaneous recommendation for loan approval. Currently, those capabilities are not enabled, and the process remains 100% human.

We had an opportunity to make a difference for small businesses that had never had access to this type of financing.

Because the maximum loan size was only about $500K, we had to launch this line of business at scale, or it would fail. Our goal was to do $100M in year one, and scale to $1B by year three.

However, with this opportunity came new competition. The smaller SBA loans had lower regulatory barriers-to-entry. So while larger banks still wouldn't offer them, it would allow fintechs to compete with us on customer experience.

OUR STRATEGY

My team created a technology-powered digital version of our competitive advantage: a signature, white-glove customer experience.

I gathered my cross-functional peers and business partners and we worked to marry the vision with the reality of a successful launch, namely, launching at scale, and with significant automation.

SBA loan customers must provide quarterly financial statements to the lending bank. One update to support scale for this effort was an update to our banking portal, providing a dedicated space with automated triggers to collect these statements from customers.

AGGRESSIVE EXECUTION

The design team began learning about this new segment of customers we were targeting, and concepting ways to align their needs to a new platform.

Meanwhile, we roadmapped out a few different directions that we could take, which required approval from bank executives, who had asked to be looped in on critical decisions on such an important, high-visibility initiative.

A service blueprint detailing the proposed experience. Apologies for the sizing here.

An Ultimatum

While presenting the options and making our best recommendation, my partners and I were surprised to learn that none were sufficient – they were all too slow to execute.

Fintechs had entered the market, but not in the way we expected. Rather than competing directly with us, they sought to sell us a SaaS platform, promising go-to-market in two months.

While no one believed they could deliver that quickly, our (seemingly ultra-aggressive) best solution offered a first release in 6 months, with subsequent releases each month for a mature, scaled program by year end.

We were given six months to launch the entire program at scale, or the bank would buy a solution.

FINDING RESOURCES

For the design team, this was a new program with an additional series of products to support. Operating with a flat budget, we were unable to hire. We were asked to continue supporting our existing commitments and had to find the resources to support all of our company's needs.

We looked at different ways to allocate the team, choosing one that worked best for the new timeline. We also were able to secure a seat from our product partners that had been looking to backfill a PM role – but ultimately the organization went into a full hiring freeze.

We built our UX roadmap in Figma, finding we needed to add specific contexts and linking to manage the complexity of the effort with the speed we were moving at. The primary product roadmap lived in Product Board, which we used to share timelines with executives, and the engineers worked in Jira, the source of truth.

CRITICAL DECISIONS

We learned on our robust design system to reduce our resource commitments to other critical initiatives during this three-month span.

We settled on the following:

Front load the work for the critical first 3 months. The timeline was 6 months to launch, meaning to stay ahead of development we had 10-12 weeks to solve the problem, work through any technical challenges, secure partner and stakeholder alignment, and finish our deliverables.
This meant all hands on deck, and I became the POC for all other support so we could quickly pivot back to our existing work when this quarter had completed. This POC work included one-off designs, consulting, recommendations, decisions, meeting representation, re-sharing critical decisions, and routing partners through the design system as much as possible.
For the second 3 months, we would have to finish any necessary troubleshooting, learning, iterating, and testing with our partners with a single, senior designer and player-coach manager, who was functioning as a researcher and analyst. We also kept our principal designer on standby to help maintain the bar for quality, given the immense pressure for maximum speed-to-market.

THE SPEED OF LIGHT

We needed to deliver solutions for the following things in three months:

A zero-to-one dynamic digital loan application, built specifically for the compliance specifications of the newer small SBA 7a loans, with as much automation as possible.
A zero-to-one automated routing funnel to ensure customer who apply for a loan online are applying for the correct one.
A significant update to our banking portal, to account for the new banking products, and still allow for money movement within multiple business accounts.
Retrofitting our primary loan facilitation platform for lenders and bank employees to account for the new loan products.

For customers, the entire lending process can be completed from a mobile device.

Zen, Then Panic

There were two major issues with what we needed to deliver. First, a decision had been made to change banking cores, and we were in the transition process. This meant that the new technology would be built on the new core, and customers could have accounts on the old one. The transition timeline didn't account for a new banking product, and there were several common scenarios where customers wouldn't be able to move money between. It required some creative problem-solving to build something workable that didn't end in a customer facing a 5-day hold when moving money between their own accounts.

Second, the loan officers supporting our legacy SBA business were not happy with the facilitation platform retrofit. The additional capabilities and functionality supported the staff working on the new small SBA loans, but was literally and figuratively a barrier for the legacy SBA business. It effectively impeded loan officers by placing automation guardrails on what had been a relatively free-wheeling sales process, required an immense amount of change management, and a follow-up roadmap to rearchitect the platform in a way that satisfied everyone.

CALM IN CRISIS

As the deadline neared, the engineering organization began to panic. It became clear that we would not finish on time. I got together with my cross-functional peers and we began to make heavy, last-minute scope cuts. Anything that was not essential had to go.

It put immense pressure on the design organization, as we were tasked with last-minute problem-solving, and aggressive redelivery, sometimes within hours, of work that had been done for months, all while knowing we'd need to immediately iterate back toward our original solutions post-launch. There were a lot of late nights. We weren't happy with the situation, but we stepped up and delivered for our business.

The Closing Checklist provided flexibility for Closers if they would like additional documentation during the Closing phase of the lending process.

THE LAUNCH IS HELD

Down to the final week, some challenges with testing and getting the production environments stood up threatened to delay the launch.

Ultimately, the CIO made the call to push the launch back two weeks.

The issues were solved and we did launch after that initial delay, but we had failed to meet the deadline.

Setting up the environment to test how we showed customers their funded loans, in their account, held up the launch.

Financial Success, Mixed Results

The financial results we achieved by launching this business so quickly had a massive, positive impact on our overall business. Speed-to-market truly was the most critical factor. We beat the competition, both known and unknown. We made a lot of money, quickly. The numbers shown here were all within the six months after launch.

But, we had a lot of technical debt to solve and relationships to repair. The group of lenders who defined our core business were very upset, their entire sales process had been upended.

Some of our best customers, business owners who had given us repeat business were also impacted with login challenges, forced password resets, and wild UI swings – even multiple portals in a handful of instances. We had to indvidually manage each of these situations.

$125M+

Incremental loan production, beating expectations by 25%

$750K+

Net income per week generated, and accelerating

+15%

Impact on the bank's overall net income

DESIGN OUTCOMES

Closer to home, our design team had very clearly demonstrated the immense impact it could have on both the bank's top and bottom lines. We delivered, twice, and were able to uphold quality while doing so.

It helped us secure additional future investment for staff and tools, and we defied stereotypes to become trusted business partners with a track record of results.

Ultimately, we demonstrated all four key aspects of our design practice: strategy, execution, learning, and collaboration.

In my mind, we still won.

87.9

SUS score for customer-facing application routing (UX-Lite)

22

New loan application capacity per lender (+80%)

14%

Increase in loan throughput speed (4 days per loan)

info@brettsebbio.com

Building, scaling, and leading high-performing design teams that elevate experiences, creating world-class products that are data-informed and consumer-validated.