UX Product Design: FIS Payments Modernization (2024)

Problem

Clients and business stakeholders were looking to modernize a legacy business banking product, including a more streamlined payments functionality (e.g., ACH, wires, real-time payments).

Impact

Expanded customer base to include small business users for an established business banking product.
Created a new payments feature to better align with most users’ mental model, while maintaining legacy functionality for customers who needed a batch processing model.
Reduced UX debt by including items in the backlog for teams to pick up as they were working on priority business requirements without UX fixes becoming a separate project. For example, as the team was working on implementing new regulatory requirements for making wire transfers, we included smaller UX fixes to improve language and interaction consistency within that flow to remove points of frustration for the user.

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Context

This example centers around two goals for a SaaS, multi-tenant business banking application:

Bank clients and end users were looking for a more modern, streamlined payments functionality.
Product and business leadership were looking to expand the user base to include small businesses, in addition to the current mid- to large-size business users. Small business payments needs are different in many ways than commercial business banking.

Working Document

Created a collaborative working document where analysis, competitor information, notes, recommendations and exploratory concepts/wireframes/designs were kept.

This made sharing progress with stakeholders and pulling together a presentation much easier, as well as providing documentation for any other team members who might need to pick up the project without them having to reinvent the wheel.

Current State Analysis

Is there research available? In this case, there was limited small business persona/user research but nothing specific to this business banking product, so I moved forward with other methodologies to help make decisions and recommendations.

Conducted/collected information architecture, user task, and heuristic reviews for the payments flows. Created user journeys/flows and analysis matrices to organize that information.

Competitor Analysis

Conducted analysis with competitor business banking user guides (in the absence of having access to their actual products), as well as accounting software popular with small businesses.

Synthesized data, created a chart and summary to highlight how our product compared to others in the industry.

I also looked at other features available in similar products intended for small businesses, the audience we wanted to attract to use our product. Use that information to inform design as well.

Insights Gained

Among many insights, the most relevant one was that business banking users, especially small businesses, thought of payments as “I need to pay person/company for X reason.” Ideally, include stored payee data – name, account numbers, preferred payment rail, etc. - to streamline the data entry needed for a transaction.

This was a departure from the current flow, where the user started by choosing the payment rail – ACH, wires, real-time transfer, etc. - then entered or imported payee data.

Recommendations

This undertaking would benefit from some internal design-thinking workshops and user research, especially with small business users.

The idea of “payments modernization” included different functionality depending on who you asked. Holding an internal stakeholder workshop would help align scope and priorities so the team could move forward with the same vision and goals.

Results - Now

Identify “low hanging fruit” items in the current product that would improve consistency in the UI and overall interaction patterns without a significant effort. Reduce UX debt. This could be addressed at any time.

Results - Next

Build new Payee Management functionality that streamlines the start of any payment process (bill pay, ACH, wire transfer, real-time transfers). Concepts and wireframes were created to support this proposal, that was built out as an enhancement to the product.

Results - Later

Because this was a significant business goal, it was recommended to start with what we had, but to conduct user research and usability tests to better understand user needs and pain points with the current product. Ideally, the goal was to create a future version that would stand out in the business banking landscape. This would require a funding ask.

Ann Navin UX Portfolio