Insurance Loan Customization
Ascend, 2022-2023
Skills: Product engineering, UX improvements
Tools: React, Ruby on Rails, Retool
Collaborators: Karen Ni, Vytas Kaleinikas (designers)
How can we help businesses get favorable financing for their insurance coverage?
Ascend aims to modernize the payment infrastructure of insurance. Their product allows insurance agencies to sell policies to their customers (typically small-medium businesses) with financing terms offered by a third-party loan provider.
Ascend realized the value of customizable loan terms early on, but the process used to be handled entirely manually through the support team. The team decided that it was in our best interest to offer a loan customization feature in the product (still requiring some support intervention with reviewing requests). I collaborated with our designers to decide the user experience of the feature, and then implemented it from end to end.
Requirements:
Request a downpayment %
Request an interest rate %
Allow the support team to manage loan requests easily (approve, deny, modify terms)
Considerations:
Some requests (under a specific downpayment or interest rate) require manual review + approval by the loan provider + approval by Ascend support
Loan request page and request status
V1/V1.5
What I learned from customer feedback…
Customers want to request specific down payment dollar amounts, but the loan company only accepts percentage requests.
Customers are confused on interest rate vs. APR and reach out to support.
A higher down payment for semiannual and quarterly payments leads to quicker approvals.
The loan company usually asks for policy information/documents downstream, increasing email exchanges with support.
Customers want to see clearly the original loan terms vs. what they requested.
V2
Outcomes
During my time at Ascend (and to this day!), this feature helped process hundreds of loan requests (hundreds of thousands of dollars) per week. The feature has been well-received by customers, especially with continuous UX improvements, resulting in several 10/10 Net Promoter Score results specifically calling out this experience.
How can we help the Ascend support team manage loan requests (approve, deny, apply counteroffer terms from loan company)?
I designed and built many versions of an internal dashboard tool to help the support team with these actions, iterating often based on the feedback I collected from the team on a regular basis. With each version, I improved the affordances in terms of page actions as well as visual clarity of information.
V1
V2
V3
Outcomes
This tool helped our support team manage dozens of loan requests per week in a way that required minimal engineering intervention. With each iteration of the tool, the support team was able to handle cases more and more quickly. Prior to this feature, the support-only workflow took 2-3 business days to complete on average. The in-product workflow takes less than 1 business day from start to finish.
Additional customer experiences I built at Ascend
A dynamic page for customers to update cancelation funds for canceled policies:
A table showing all of the transactions for a certain business’ insurance coverage:
