NAB

Background

I was asked to lead the discovery and design toward improved process and tools for NAB analysts who deal with medium-to-high-risk new-to-bank customers. Starting with a research components with interviews, I would eventually provide designs for PEGA to adpopt and build a bespoke tool for NAB analysts.

Role

Researcher,
UX and UI designer

Team

Product Owner, two Business Analysts, PEGA Solution Architect, and various SMEs and PEGA Developers.

Timeframe

8 months

Tools

Whiteboards, Post-it® notes and Sketch

Approach

I set the expectation that I’d need access to the team and time from volunteers within the team to observe and study how they work and operate. I was told at the time by the head of NABs Financial Crime team that this design research centric effort was “the best approach I’ve seen at any bank…”.

Being approved to shadow the agents who dealt with very sensitive customer profiles and individuals was fascinating. I audited the tools that analysts used, their proficiency and the nuance of usage verging on self-taught and organically developed processes that evolved to fill technology gaps. I found out that owing to the investigative nature of their roles, their day-to-day work was as much art as science in knowing how to identify red-flags. Nevertheless, it was clear that many gains could be made in helping the team to design a bespoke reporting and analysis management system built around the framework of PEGA Business Process Management (BPM).

Findings

Analysts were astounded by the collaborative involvement I showed - by truly making the effort to deeply understand their daily pains in ongoing, repetitive and sometimes asynchronous analysis.

Analysts suffered from a near literal swivel-chair dizziness in managing and maintaining so many disparate systems (PEGA, NAB CRM, Documents & Evidence, Interpol, Austrac, ABR as well as sundry other applications like Word, Excel spreadsheets, Screen recording. The list was long…)

Outcomes

We baselined the current experience of the sundry tools which wasn’t easy as each analyst had cultivated their preferred suite of the board mix of tools. We observed that, despite an expectation by NAB to systemise everything, there is and always must be a human level decision involvement in KYC and Fin Crime analysis.

Furthermore this human intervention layer must implicitly allow for individual analysts preferences and behaviors to enable through and meaningful analysis. Design as a process has a clear and important role to play in improvement the deepest levels of services to prompt upstream and downstream experience improvements for customers.

With a confidence interval of 95% we shifted the experience ‘SUS’ score range of 26.5-57.2 (poor) to a new high of 79.1-97.5 (excellent)

Nota bene

Owing to the sensitive nature of this project, dealing with financial crime analysis, I can only address the specifics of the work in general terms. The supporting visuals have been reconstructed by me for illustrative purposes only and don't represent artefacts taken from NAB.