chime

Unlocking instant loan capabilities

Chime is a financial technology company that offers mobile-first banking services, such as fee-free checking accounts and high-yield savings, through its partner banks. It is widely known for user-friendly features like early direct deposit access and overdraft protection.

Background

The Business Problem

Chime's existing product suite: SpotMe (fee-free overdraft), MyPay (early wage access), and Credit Builder (credit-building card); was built to serve the everyday financial needs of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, but left a gap for members facing larger, unexpected expenses like a car repair or a bill due before payday. To address this, Chime sought to expand its portfolio with Instant Loans: small loans of up to $500, funded almost immediately after approval and repaid over roughly three months.

The User Problem

Offering this Instant Loan’s at scale required a reliable internal system for financial analysts to configure and manage loan policies. In the early day’s of launching the Instant Loans, analysts depended heavily on engineers to manually code loan policies into Chime's platform, creating bottlenecks that slowed the team's ability to respond to shifting credit conditions or launch new loan configurations. Financial analysts needed a self-service tool that gave them direct control to create, adjust, and fine-tune loan policies independently reducing engineering dependency and enabling faster, more agile decision-making.

The Solution

build a mobile-responsive platform for users to take workshops & find mentors

Throughout several meetings, I took the stakeholders through a series of exercises to determine what was needed to create a minimum viable product. This was done through the creation of personas, user stories, user journeys, and the eventual building of an initial information architecture. Once a minimum viable product was built I ran extensive user-tests with a beta-customer to gather feedback and optimize the platform.

Given the scope of what was to be created, I knew it would be critical to design a site map and page linking structures as a foundation for Kanektos functionality. I took the initiative to draft and implement a map that would enhance everyday user flows to ensure ease of use for the customer.

Customer Portal Site Map

Build a design system that scales

With a six-month alpha and eight-month beta timeline, I developed a design system to:

• Streamline design management across projects

• Enable rapid design replication through standardized components

• Shift design focus from visual tweaking to solving complex problems

• Ensure visual and functional design consistency

• Reduce miscommunication and wasted design/development time

The goal was to create a robust library of components, colors, and typography that would serve as a foundational design infrastructure.

Optimizing User Flows

When the onboarding process was initially conceived Kanketo’s program development department wanted to collect as much information about each user as possible to help them better determin what types of workshops to offer up. With this in mind, onboarding had several steps for collecting personal/professional information.

Early usability testing showed clear indicators that there were too many steps between sign on and getting to the workshop marketplace so I decision was made to direct users to the workshop marketplace directly after the “Almost there” message instead of first showing them the home page. This had the added advantage of giving the users little doubt about what their first goal uplon initially signing up would be - signing up for their first workshop.

After alpha testing it was clear that the onboarding was still too tiring for the users. While the program development team did want to collect data, their real goal was to get people signed up for their first workshop, so a decision was made to drop two more steps. After this choice, onboarding fatigue decreased significantly and the rate of signing up for an initial workshop jumped by 2x.

The Platform

Get quick updates on platform activity

The homepage offers an overview of activities for workshops, clubs, and mentorships. Via the main navigation, users can find and join workshops or clubs, follow peers, and find mentors for career growth. They also see notifications from their groups and mentors. The sidebar provides fast access to future workshops, and the main newsfeed shows posts and suggests relevant workshops. Alpha and beta tests helped streamline and prioritize key page features to reduce clutter.

Create a way for users to find workshops, Match with mentors, & More

One of the most popular features of Kanekto is workshops. Each workshop was led by expert guides for small groups of individuals within a company. By having small numbers of participants, bonding between people became easier and people were more likely to participate actively. We built an easy-to-use marketplace for these workshops where people could search, sort, and filter through the wide array of offerings and preview highlights via video. They could easily see what their peers were participating in and get recommendations for workshops to take.

SIGN UP FOR WORKSHOPS

Once users select a workshop, they can go to an individual workshop page to get more information about the class overall and a session-to-session agenda. From the workshop page, they can sign up, mark a workshop as a favorite to track it for the future, add the workshop to their calendar, see who else is taking a workshop, learn about the workshop guide, find related in-company clubs to join, post on discussion boards, and more.

Video conference portal for workshop sessions

As the vast majority of workshops were designed to be virtual so employees from different office locations could attend at the same time, I designed a video conference software portal for Kanekto.

Outcome

Kanekto was able to launch the the beta product with their first live and paying customers on time. Initial buzz from those involved was very positive. Initial success lead to further development of new workshop products to further grow the platform