Dear (none)Designer,
Welcome back to the thirty-first Design at Scale™ Newsletter – focusing on innovation and how design drives change in a large organisation or an agency.
Trading has always been a little mysterious to people outside of financial environments. As the world remains in the numbers we have seen, we have seen very little design over the last 40 years. The majority of trading platforms are highly regulated entities, and therefore, it becomes very difficult to update them.
Often, we see that our colleagues are facing complex challenges stemming from an insufficient layout, lengthy user flows, and complex structures, all of which hinder the development of a simple yet profoundly impactful user interface for trading platforms.
With the arrival of a new wave of digital services that allow online micro-trading, we start experiencing a new wave of user interface that's allowing a relatively high volume of traits to be adjusted in sequence and processed through a new set of tools that are simple to operate and reach desirable outcomes in a relatively short time.
This pressure of micro-finance is coming to these big trading platforms. The challenge is similar: an extensive number of trades in a sequence. The difference lies in the legislative requirements between the countries and how each financial house operates. And that is why all regulated banks start bringing in design professionals who specialise in design systems architecture and design thinking to, in some way, challenge and adjust the existing environments to new workflows.
Ultimately, we have reached the point where our development teams no longer drive the user interface and user experience decisions in silos, and where the collaboration between design thinking, service design and product design delivery works in cohesion to profoundly impact the decisions and agreements of simplifying the user flow that drives the impact of this trading platform.
Quite rightly, if you want to trade within the 10 of thousands of Euro or USD, the regulatory requirements will be relatively straightforward. If your business, however, operates with trading assets exceeding $25 million, especially across different continents, such as EMEA and NA, let alone APAC, the complexity of the financial agreements between these institutions can become quite challenging. Now the challenge does not come with. The trades themselves, but getting onboarded onto such a platform can be quite a lengthy and time-consuming process.
It is a significant exercise of so-called KYC, meaning "Know Your Customer". Onboarding usually took up to 170 days. You might ask, why? Why do we need such a long time to onboard the client?
It is not necessary to address the business account name or the address of your organisation. It is more a matter of the trading agreements between countries and verifying all legislative requirements that enable you, the organisation, to hold a disposable amount of assets for trading purposes.
The team of service designers specialising in finance has been tasked with mapping an existing process to identify potential improvements. Review the documents and file handling to identify where the service can be improved. Reviewing the process of outsourcing document revision to APAC is a lengthy process. How minimal automation can improve data entry and enable the procedure to be executed within 24 hours or less. Transforming an internal communication between the client and their client manager into a seamless dialogue rather than a cold request for document submission.
Often, collecting the documents is the greatest challenge. Especially when new clients need to understand the legislation they must comply with and the information they must provide to trade between countries. Our new online tools guide customers across all steps to prepare all necessary documents before the onboarding procedure, thereby shortening the process from 170 days to 90.
And we haven't stopped there. Bringing both parties, the bank and the client, in a single space to collect, confirm, evaluate, verify and sign the documents. Allowing all participants to mitigate the risk and agree on legal necessities, enabling the company/client to trade.
This simple test in the form of a coded prototype allowed newly onboarded customers to start trading in small batches. With a rising demand for goods that fit their portfolio, they can request an extension.
This trigger generated a smart contract that guided the client through the necessary steps of extended KYC, allowing trading to exceed $500K to $2.5 million. The feature allowed the client to test a new product in small batches and bank to see how clients trade, improving the product.
While scaling their trades, the legislative function in the bank has reviewed their submission and allowed/denied the upgrade. By eliminating handovers between different parties and internal departments within the bank, and unifying everything in a single digital environment, the trading managers were able to reduce the customer journey from 170 days to 10 working days.
It all comes down to collaboration. By witnessing a profound integration between design thinking, service design, and product design development, the bank has demonstrated that the new generation of designers is capable of crafting profoundly different experiences for their customers.
For more information, please visit Designa at Scale™ – GRID Magazine, where you can find additional relevant articles that explore high-performing teams, self-organising teams of 001, teams of 010, and teams of 100 that deliver the value proposition within a product-led environment.
