Settlement Instructions
Project Management, User Experience
Revolutionising the process of creating standing settlement instructions for corporate payments, making it simpler and more efficient than ever before.
Our clients have to toggle through many modules in the trade centre just to check their instructions.
— Chris Chin, product owner
Standard Settlement Instructions (SSIs) simplify recurring transfers of funds, securities, or foreign currency with pre-agreed instructions.
However, there is not one place that hosts the instructions in Straight2Bank. It is scattered throughout the platform.
Product goals
Easy searching and filtering
Enhance the user experience by enabling easy filtering and searching through potentially hundreds of SSIs. Users have to take a long time to organise and manually give their instructions. It was usually done through voice or email.
Show statuses of the instructions
If SSIs are being used by an organisation, some of them have to be approved by checkers before they can be used. This needs to be clear in the status of the SSI.
Simplify tasks
Streamline task completion for creating, editing, and deleting Standard Settlement Instructions (SSIs).
Examining standing settlement instructions from other banks and platforms
Research
Landscape analysis
We did a quick glance at commercial banks that have digitised their instructions process. We learned that even though manual instruction forms were complex, these banks reduced cognitive load by breaking up the form. They organised the instructions with clear data tables and a robust search that could quickly pull out an instruction ready for use.
Design workshops
In the design discovery stage, we facilitated workshops with product owners to map out the user flows. With prior experience in completing digital instructions in multiple banks, they understand the challenges and frustrations of the process.
They pointed out that there were different users and statuses for these instructions.
Users
Creator - creates the instruction
Approver - approves the instruction
Hybrid - this person is both the creator & approver
Statuses
Uploaded
Pending authorisation
Authoriser declined
Bank approved
Archived
Flow chart created with the Standard Chartered product owners
Design
The UX design process for this project was highly efficient due to the active involvement of the product owners. Throughout the design process, we worked closely with the product owners to identify user needs, goals, and pain points.
This collaboration allowed us to create detailed user flows and error states that were tailored to the target user groups.
We jumped from user flows and block frames straight to high fidelity because we had the Unified design system already built. It sped up our workflow since we could use the components like Lego blocks at this point.
Design system developed for Standard Chartered corporate banking
Testing
We conducted moderated usability testing with five users that deal with standing instructions day in and day out. It scored 81.9 on System Usability Scoring. After testing, we took three more months to improve the overall experience and update the components in accordance with the new Unified Design System.
Creating a new instruction
“This is much better. 6 out of 7. The user interface is much cleaner and nicer, and more intuitive. Much better than the current platform. Would love to use it. Looking forward to seeing this live.”
— A user during testing
SSI went into development in Q3-Q4 of 2022. We worked closely with the developers to take them through the user flows. We did this through several sync-ups where they could ask questions and leave feedback.