OakNorth

Project purpose

Monitoring a bank’s loan portfolio is a cumbersome and time consuming for most banks. Information about the underlying borrower is unstructured and spread across multiple systems (core banking systems, third party workflow systems, and email attachments); and it takes a significant amount of time to align these into a consistent format for analysis. This issue is further aggravated within the Lower Middle Market where public information about borrowers is limited, and the quality of the data immediately available makes this a high cost segment to monitor with any level of granular detail.

The approach

Discovery - As Design Lead, my role was to understand the problems we are solving and design a product that meets the needs of our clients. Based upon our initial research, and to help us understand our users’ needs and motivations, we have put together a set of persona profiles.

User Journey Maps, Wireframes, and UI designs - Following the comprehensive research, we have taken the hypothesis and prototypes through multiple rounds of user testing and refinement to propose a product that provides our users with the best monitoring tools for their loan portfolio.

The solution

Loan Monitoring Dashboard - A 360 degrees view of the loan portfolio enables to monitor the ongoing financial health of borrowers and also to assess whether borrowers and loans are performing as per the origination case.

Portfolio Insights - The software can apply proprietary stress scenarios to the portfolio and assign each borrower a risk rating based on factors such as liquidity, debt capacity, and profitability. These factors can be dynamically customised to reflect the lender’s credit risk criteria and appetite.

Alerting - The software analyses each borrower’s data in the context of its geography and sector. Monitoring billions of data points to detect anomalies in the loan portfolio and alert when a portfolio, transaction, loan, or borrower needs attention.

Final result

We have made it very easy for banks to monitor their loan portfolio. After uploading basic information about their loans and borrowers, users will start to receive insights including visualisation of the loan portfolio - highlighting the most vulnerable loans, as well as portfolio optimisation opportunities - for example upselling & cross-selling opportunities.