The LendKey Network is an end-to-end digital lending partner to hundreds of banks and credit unions, delivering new customers and members with servicing throughout the life of a loan. The company needed a solution to expand their lending reach even further with greater flexibility.
My team needed to create a network, which would allow borrowers with student loan debt to view all available lenders based on their credit profile, in order to refinance their interest rate and/or monthly payments (a Kayak.com model but for lending). The user would be able to sort and filter loan offers, in order to select the best one for their needs. The interface would also create a brand standard with a consistent and common UI across all products.
We needed answers to a lot of outstanding questions. What information was required from the user? Could we issue a “soft pull” from the credit bureaus to pre-approve them? How would we determine the “field of membership” for each partnering credit union or bank? The answers existed, but it took partnering and working with multiple departments in order to first understand the questions, then get them resolved.
I performed a competitive analysis on how others in our industry handle issues like application forms, rates, calls to action, and legal copy. I created personas for our users based on age, income, amount of debt, and other important attributes.
The LendKey Network was quite complex, with numerous moving parts and non-negotiable steps. After many brainstorming sessions, we were able to create a composite list of requirements and functions. From there, we created paper prototypes with agility that allowed us to easily test the process on internal users and to iterate at will.
Working with the team, I assisted with creating a detailed process flow to walk members through each step, aiding in the understanding of the product and its intricacies.
Both the paper prototypes and the flowchart evolved into low-fidelity wireframes. The next step was working with Product Owners and Tech Leads in order to both understand the complexity of the project and to estimate agile epics.
I created high-fidelity InVision demos with a series of questions and actions for users to walk through. These participants’ answers and motions were recorded. These users were then organized by demographics such as age, income, loan amount, citizenship and credit score.
The results were eye-opening in that most users did not understand basic credit concepts of Fixed vs. Variable APR, Cosigners, Terms, and others. They were also reluctant to give out information such as their Social Security Number, email and/or phone number. However, they were experts at both filtering and customizing their loan offers and had a lot of praise for this functionality. Numerous changes based on this testing was made in a second iteration, which was then tested again.
With the creation of LendKey Network, the company has invested $30 million US dollars to both create and continually innovate a lending-as-a-service platform in order to help lenders build and run a profitable digital lending business.
LendKey has since deployed more than $2.7 billion in lending capital and serviced more than $1.84 billion in loans on behalf of hundreds of banks and credit unions. In all, more than 87,000 consumers have had their financing needs met through lenders that partner with LendKey.
I spent many years updating and researching the design evolution per user testing feedback and A/B testing. I was able to create UX/UI that was more streamlined with third-party vendors in order to both automate and shorten the process.