Toyota Financial Services
Underwriter experience
Background
Toyota Financial Services has been issuing and maintaining real estate loans to Toyota dealerships for decades. Toyota dealerships apply real estate loans with Toyota Financial Services, and Toyota Financial Services need to review and analyze each loan to ensure a complete understanding of dealership performance. Internally, the system used to maintain, review, and analyze loans has been the same. Underwriters and loan approvers need review and approve thousands of loans, and it is crucial to have a product experience that allows them to do their daily tasks easily and intuitively. Initially, our team hired an agency to update the product experience. Then we found it was hard to access the designs from the agency, and the hand off process to the developers was time consuming. Understanding the needs of the underwriters was crucial to create the product experience that they need.
Regular meetings with underwriters
I meet with underwriters several times a week, to ask them for product feedbacks, and present design updates. From meeting with the underwriters, I have learned a lot about their daily tasks and work patterns. It was an effective way to figure out the problem with the current product experience. Here are some of the underwriter feedbacks:
“It is difficult to view which loans I need to get to first.”
“I can't figure out which tasks to get to first on the dashboard.”
“It's hard to filter and categorize loans based on progress.”
"The data tables were too busy with information, and it is time consuming to analyze the dealership performance."
"As a manager, it's hard to view loan assignments to my team members."
"I can't keep track of loans that I have already submitted."
I compiled all the results from the underwriter meetings, separated the feedbacks into different groups. Then I analyzed the different groups of results before coming up with solution proposals.
Difficult to use
Many underwriters found it hard to comprehend the dashboard design, and didn't know where to begin by looking at the dashboard.
Hard to analyze loans
Underwriters find it difficult to focus on the right information to analyze dealership loans, and spend more time than necessary on a single loan.
Hard to find the right information
Many underwriters emphasized on the need to find a specific loan, or easily view loan statuses, which the legacy experience lacked.
The underwriters found it difficult to nagivate and use the existing system.
Understanding underwriter workflow
Loan Queue
Based on underwriter feedbacks, I designed the loan queue view that allows an underwriter to easily filter loans by their statuses.
Desktop
Mobile
Ease of use
- Display loan queue information that categorizes loans by their progress.
- Redesign the loan review and loan analysis flow to make the process easy.
Focus on immediate tasks
- I redesigned the loan queue to place the most urgent tasks first, and make them easy to find.​
Understand underwriter tasks
- Listen to underwriters to describe their daily routines, to create an experience that fits their routine.
Analyzing a loan
I needed to make sure every data that an underwriter needed to analyze a loan is presented when they are needed. I wanted to ensure that the underwriter can easily review the loan status, and view the loan details.
Desktop
Mobile
Displaying the terms clearly and intuitively took several iterations. I showed several options to the underwriters, we discussed and came up with the option that can be used for any terms.
Uploading Roma Approval docs is an essential function requested by underwriters, and it is crucial to have this information when evaluating a loan.
The process is ongoing, and the goal is always to create useful and intuitive experience for underwriters.
Our team is still in the process of meeting with underwriters, reviewing the existing experience, and updating it to a useful and intuitive experience. The right experience takes time, collaboration, and iterations, especially when it is crucial for underwriters to review all the right data to determine dealership performance.
Understanding every detail of the underwriter routine is always the goal.
I made sure I asked every detail of the underwriting process to make sure I understood what the underwriters need during the workflow, because reviewing a loan is a very detail-oriented task. Every number and every detail has to make sense to make sure the dealership performance meets our standard. When the underwriters say they need a function, I listen, and I go to the sketching board.
Making data easy to find makes a ton of difference.
When we meet with underwriters and ask them the frictions when interacting with the product, many of them expressed that it is difficult to find the necessary data to make a determination about a dealership. That is why it is crucial to sync up with them and show them the financial trend designs to make sure it is designed intuitively.
Previous experience
Updated experience