Fusion Lendercomm
Company : Finastra
​
Target Industry : Financial Institutions(Agent Bank & Lender Bank)​
BNY Mellon, HSBC, BNP Paribas, Natixis, Société Générale
Fusion LenderComm
A blockchain-based platform that enables agent banks and lenders to securely exchange syndicated-loan data in real time.
Discovery
The Challenge
In traditional syndicated lending:
-
Multiple lenders and an agent bank share data via emails, spreadsheets, and PDFs.
-
Data on loan balances, repayments, and interest accruals is outdated or inconsistent.
-
Lenders spend hours reconciling data and requesting updates.
-
Agent banks face high operational overhead to maintain transparency.
This causes:
-
Delayed decision-making
-
Poor visibility into risk exposure
UX Goal
​Communication of information between agents and lenders still relies on email and faxes.
This reduces speed, boosts headcount, costs and inefficiency (since it can require manually retyping notices resulting in human errors that increase reconciliation breaks). The huge amount of data, complexity, lack of standards and regulation worldwide is why it has not been addressed.
Design a transparent, real-time, and intuitive data-sharing experience that:
-
Reduces manual communication
-
Builds trust in the data source
-
Empowers lenders with self-service access
-
Seamlessly integrates into existing workflows (e.g., Loan IQ)
Opportunity
The syndicated loan market is a $5 trillion dollar a year industry. It consists of multi-million dollar loans and is a vital source of funding for corporations, infrastructure projects and governments worldwide. A rapid increase in the number of lenders, especially non-banks has added to the complexity.
​
Digital transformation of the syndicated loan market.
Streamline the exchange of information and bring transparency for all parties; Thereby, saving time and money, removing the need for rekeying which reduces errors, reconciliation and queries.
USER & PERSONA
For each deal, the agent communicates with 200-1,000 lenders, each capable of handling over 1,000 deals and processing several hundred thousand transactions annually.
Challenge
At one point they were going to separate LenderComm into 2 applications, one for Agent and Lender. But I obtained stakeholder buy-in to implement roles and permissions to prevent redundancy; Thus, saving time and resources for the company. This required me to managed design mockups for multiple roles. So, I helped create and maintain a profile matrix to track and update user permissions for each release.
​
Design system
I was told not to use the aging design system, so I referenced the branding to create my own.
About 6 months after development had been using my design system, the corporate UX team released a design system that looked like it was made for mobile. It had issues with accessibility such as colors that didn’t meet the WCAG AA standards, inconsistent icons and small fonts (8pt and light gray). I brought up the issues with the corporate head of UX and got approval to continue with my design system that was accessible.
Opportunity
User-centered design
Finastra had another product dealing with the syndicated loan market (Loan IQ) and the people on that team were great for usability testing.
I also had design reviews with stakeholders and team reviews with development to make sure the mockups aligned with business, it was possible to build and to get a time estimates. When new members joined the team I did usability testing with them to get a fresh pair of eyes on Fusion LenderComm. Conducting A/B tests was another method I used to ensure I was getting an outside perspective.
KEY OBSERVATION FROM USER TESTING
Insights
Terminology varies between countries and businesses, so it was important to use system agnostic terms.
Opportunity
Competition
The 3 biggest banks in the world, announced they were partnering to solve the same problem.
This only further proved our solution was one that was needed.
Our senior product manager, decided to pivot and leverage the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in the syndicated loan market used Finastra’s other product Loan IQ. So, the idea of a Loan IQ module was born.
Outcome
The communication between lenders and agents was streamlined. And allowed lenders to view and process over 30 types of transactions, automated deal mapping and transaction processing and integrated with Loan IQ.
KEY OBSERVATION FROM USER TESTING
Connecting Disparate
Systems
I had a creative strategy to automatically map deal data based on key data and weighing those factors for recommendations.
The issue was that the lender’s serving system might not have all the data or match what we have. I kept thinking of how the user needed to do extra work to map deal data between the 2 systems.
I brought up my concern in a meeting and showed the idea of auto-mapping in a mockup. After a few collaborative meetings with the business analysts, some key pieces of data were pinpointed that would be similar. For the North American markets, there were 2 key data points to help identification. With that I advocated for the giving weighted values for these data points for recommendation ranking, and if they all matched, then Fusion LenderComm would automatically map them.