Automating Receivables Payments

This work is inflight; details around the value prop, business case, and procurement process have been redacted.

Partnering with a fintech to provide Capital One’s Commercial users a capability to automate their receivables was a top priority and key initiative for Treasure Management at the beginning of 2021. The product team had already down selected to four potential providers and was about to review RFPs when I was asked to come in as the accountable design manager in this space.

My job was twofold:

1. to represent the “voice of the user” to figure out which fintech was the best for our clients, and

2. to use service design techniques to help onboard the selected fintech faster than the standard 12-18 months

Below, I’m not showing the core process that AR managers go through for the “cash application” process; it can be pretty time consuming for them. I appreciated the opportunity to try and bring them some great capabilities to make their lives a little bit easier.

four rfPs (Requests for proposal)

With a turnaround time of less than one week, I used a large format piece of paper and a generic SWOT analysis to synthesize ~500 pages of material across the four fintechs. Based on our target clients, market segment, and knowledge of our users’ processes — the answer was honestly pretty straight forward. Sure, there were also some formal google sheets involved for my final inputs.

At this stage of the project, if my house was burning down I would’ve grabbed this piece of paper before my wallet.

We had a hypothesis. Now we needed to prove it, and onboard them.

DECIDING ON THE RIGHT FINTECH

one sticky note

“What makes this a compelling product that we can sell that also meets the business goals?”

This sticky note stayed on the bottom of my monitor for more than a month. I had been hearing all along that this was a massive business opportunity —- but no one could tell me why our users would find it compelling.

Our sales teams also hadn’t been included yet - which had doomed at least one product previously. This question flipped the script.

This created buy in to set out on some research with full buy-in from the business.

16 qualitative, empathy interviews

After the sticky note, I initiated this research because I wanted our RFP team to:

1. Independently validate the product offerings and refine our hypothesized target strike zone.

2. Uncover latent needs for training or client set up with the new offering.

3. Understand how these products might appeal to different target segments for sales

I wrote the interview script. Mentoring a design intern, we interviewed 16 participants and synthesized the results into 6 primary groupings.

HIGHLIGHT REELS

I initiated the creation of highlight reels, a total of 10 for this study, for individual participants and synthesized topics. The intern and an external vendor created these with my copy and specific topics. These were utilized in weekly meetings with VP-level business leaders as a “listening series.” It helps when you have quotes like the ones above.

“VENDOR CRASHING” - BRINGING THAT FINTECH ON FAST

Executives at the highest level were also pushing for the team to reduce the timeframe to onboard the selected vendor from 12-18 months to 1 month.

15+ internal interviews and 6 recent partnerships

Myself and a designer on my team interviewed 15 people who had been through the onboarding process for 6 recent partnerships. This helped us document the process and establish primary pain points with a grounded, historical baseline to set executive expectations.

We created a journey map with time across the top, interwoven processes in the middle, and great pull quotes for each phase aligned at the bottom.

For each forum within the journey, we documented:

1. The expected timeline

2. Accountable executive for that review process

3. Forum and required documentation

We found more than 12 required questionnaires and forms, with 158 questions asked of external potential partners and internal product managers. We subsequently sorted and de-duped these to look for simplification.

We showed how the process could be taken down to 7 months versus 18 months for complicated partnerships. To reduce it further, multiple VPs would need to come together to streamline the individual forums (e.g. risk, procurement, legal, tech, etc).

OUTCOME

I transitioned out of this work shortly after establishing the chosen fintech partner and core value prop.

Some things did work:

1. Product did kick off process improvements, including an internal website based entirely on our findings, that guides product managers through how to execute this partnership. I called it a “treasure map.” Some people were amused by that.

2. The qualitative research we conducted cemented the preferred vendor for the business and highlighted many unanswered questions.

3. The core value prop, refined strikezone, and metrics I established remain the target.

4. These two big efforts came together. My sticky note and subsequent research seeded doubt about the validity of the business case; my process design showed them how they could implement a “test and learn” phased approach with minimal impact to the onboarding schedule.