As the Bitcoin bull market slowed & reversed, iTC's primary souce of account funding, IRa transfers, took a drastic downturn. After digging into Tableau reporting, I concluded that our primary source of funding, IRA Transfers actually represented about 60% of total revenue and AUM & were taking a major hit to conversion and churn.
As the Product Owner & Designer, I conducted internal & external research & design into building a first of its kind semi autonomous B2B automation for transferring IRA Accounts ~75% faster.
after discovery, i realized this problme had major implications to:
pii leakage: customer PII & internal data was being shared on zendesk tickets.
operational costs: our operations team was spending >50% of their time on tedious work we can automate
scaling: our primary source of Aum cannot scale, this dirrectly impacts revenue
The user flow that ITC had leveraged from inception heavily relied 3 factors: customer support via email & phone, users completing complex financial documents, & heavily manual internal processes that created PII exposure & potential internal user error.
As the market increased, these factors began to work against ITC as conversion rates dropped from ~80% to 25% & average funding team increased from 14 to 22 days.
It's important to understand the entire user journey, as once an ITC user had submitted a request to transfer most of journey then took place out of the application. Additionally, I realized at this stage that this design should not only cater to our end users, but our internal Financial Operations team as well.
The high level goals of this overhaul directly addressed the 3 primary factors that doomed the original model.
Keep the user in app & have no need for them to contact support staff via email or phone
Do not put the onus of completing complex documentation on the user, instead collect this data within the initial Transfer Request
Eliminate all PII exposure & utilize automations to limit end & internal user error
Additionally, I wanted this update to have the following KPI outcomes:
Conversion Rate >75%
Churn <25%
Average Funding Time <7 Days
To begin, I researched two primary competitors, Alto IRA & Fidelity, to see how they processed an IRA Transfer. I came away with the following conclusions
Both utilize digital signatures, ITC only accepts physical signatures
Fidelity collects all data needed in the initial request to transfer
Both keep the user in application, with little need to contact support at any time as there is continued in app support after a request has been made
A key advantage I had throughout this build was a repository of ~200,000 support tickets where I could examine thousands of user interactions with our CX & FinOps teams through their IRA Transfer. After analyzing these I found 3 common themes that I used for qualitative guidance.
Users are in a hurry & want to deal with the ins & outs of IRA Transfers as little as possible.
Users need their hand held throughout the process, not just when filling out documents.
Users are under the expectation that ITC is leveraging automation to speed things up.
Once I had a deep understanding of Fidelity, Alto & our processes, I collaborated with our Analytics, FinOps & CX teams to align our goals & how these would address known pain points backed by qualitative and quantitative data.
the user flow needed consistent iterations to inform the design. here are some of the discoveries made in process
discovery of msg stamp, where a single .png digital stamp needs to be applied to every form. this is potential pii leakage as the stamp was stored on google drive
automated faxing integration. a large majority of recipients would aonly accept via fax. we needed to integrate with an existing service htat supports fax, and allows us to automate this.
From here, I drafted a new user flow that eliminated multiple points of failure & enabled backend automation to drastically reduce time before a request is sent to a custodian.
the new product addresses the previous problems
users can self serve full in app
itc collects all data upfront, allowing for completion without user or cx intervention
Eliminate all PII exposure & utilize automations to limit end & internal user error
pii exposure eliminated, automations eliminate repetitive manual work by finops
kpi outcomes
Conversion Rate >75% → conversion rate 80%
Churn <25% → churn back to 20%
Average Funding Time <7 Days → average funding time 6 days