ABOUT

Prior to joining OakNorth in May 2022, the client ON had been sitting on some radical ideas that would transform the Commercial and Industrial Loans banking space. Applications that hopefully if realised, would reduce banks’ loan book risk. 14 months later, 3 applications have been launched within the ONCI umbrella: OakNorth Climate, OakNorth Scenarios and OakNorth Monitoring. A handful of banks have already signed up to licenses: Fifth Third (coincidentally they won an award using our Climate App), Capital One, First National amongst others.

My job, coming on board as a lead product designer, was to realise these ambitions for OakNorth. To take the ideas of the 3 applications and turn them into prototypes and validate the hypothesis. The idea being that these apps need to be designed in a way that they can be interchangeable and linked up, depending on what type of data you want to look at.

We designed and built a new platform that will allow banks to swiftly analyse the risk in their loan books, from a borrower level so that they can mitigate risk and create opportunities. For example OakNorth Climate will scan your loan book and pick out climate opportunities for your bank – with a view that borrowers are subject to climate legislations (ie. NetZero 2050), the app will tell you how fit a borrower is to survive those expectations through to 2050, and what their capital expenditure would be to survive the key points in time when legislature comes into play. This creates a lot of opportunity for lending to those borrowers – rated for ‘transition risk’, the more capital they need, the higher their risk rating.

What did the users want?
We spoke to dozens of users in banking and here are some snippets of their main desires:

As an OakNorth Climate user I want:
Lending opportunities related to Climate transition risk
To mitigate my bank's climate transition risk
To keep up to date with FED requirements and stay ahead of the competition
To understand how much money I could lose from climate transition
An accurate solution using industry standard climate models (NGFS)

As an OakNorth Scenarios user I want:
To expose industry and borrower risks in my portfolio
To be able to understand future risks based on accurate assumption models
Be equipped with data for market risks: Covid, War in Ukraine, Inflation etc.
Stress test my portfolio borrowers and industries/sectors
To adjust my assumption model macroeconomic factors (GDP, interest rates etc)

As an OakNorth Monitoring user I want:
Early warnings when my borrower has breached bank policy
One source of truth (I currently access 6 different systems)
Efficiency gains from annual reviews - you tell me the problems
I want wider peer groups that extend beyond my limited portfolio
I want real-time financial data and make decisions on that data

OakNorth Scenarios will allow users to scan their loan books and benchmark against risk, whether industrial or macroeconomic. This allow banks to stress test their borrowers against current risk, as well as forward looking risk 12,24 and 36 month in the future – basically a crystal ball! On top of this, users can create their own bespoke scenarios, ie. What happens if the base rate goes up 5%, which borrowers will not be able to pay their debts.

OakNorth Monitoring reports on early warnings on borrowers, it is plugged directly into borrowers financials and will create an alert when particular metrics go past a given threshold. The system also allows bank users to compare their borrowers to others in the same industries (peer analysis), as well as assessing their risk profile and reporting a risk rating.

An end-to-end process
Working as lead product designer, I worked the full end-to-end UX and UI process to deliver an MVP product which encapsulated the three core apps. Each app needed to be work-shopped for technical features internally and discovery sessions with users. During the Discovery and usability testing phases we spoke to C&I specialists from dozens of banks, from relationship managers to portfolio managers, from underwriters to chief risk officers, to C-Suite folks, we carefully took note of each users responsibilities and took that into account in the design process so that we knew which features were applicable to which role types.

One of the major challenges we faced, which we overcame through research, was understanding how banks perceived borrower risk and the steps they take to mitigate. In order to design these applications it was necessary to understand all the steps in a borrower’s lifecycle. Providing the right metrics and data came about through rigorous testing and discussions with SME’s to arrive at a design that is ‘industry standard’ in it’s presentation. Another challenge, which kind of follows on from the first challenge was how to build a universal system accessible to all banks to categorise industries – we opted for the NAICS system. We built the apps so that top to bottom navigation could occur from borrower, up to industry, up to sector and vice versa.

Endless Discovery
With the help of a dedicate user researcher we committed to around 9 phases of user testing, each phase ranged from 3-8 users. Each phase was aimed at specific milestone, whether it was initial discovery (phase 1) or something further down the line after 8 or 9 phases (Peers Analysis). Learnings were captured in Miro, dissected forensically and reiterations were made and then further tested.

The act of User testing itself threw up some challenges. We realised that we were unable to use the regular online user testing platforms like Usertesting, Validately or Maze. Our sessions needed to be very much Q&A sessions as well as prototype testing. None of the usual channels actually provided us with good candidates who fit within the specific roles we required, so we had to do a bit of homework and landed on Userresearch which allowed us to handpick our candidates.

Awards (so far)
Quorus Global Banking Innovation Awards
Celent Model Risk Manager 2023 Award for Fifth Third Bank