Offline-Authorization

tl;dr

Data migration limits accounts; with exceptions

An acquisition brings a data migration ilimiting account access for withdrawals, debits and deposits over 3 weekends during a 2-month duration. Exceptions for wealth management customers brought a need to authorize and maintain balances offline while remaining compliant.

Key Outcomes

100% Accounts Balances

All transactions balanced, resulting in no monetary losses.

Positive Impact on Personal Bankers

Personal bankers reported positive interactions when interacting with the application and transaction team.

My Role

Researcher / Designer
Project Manager

Timeline

6 months

Overview

Limited Access

Large-scale data migration, 3 weekends | 2 months

As the result of an acquisition, the acquired bank's customers were transitioned onto Wells Fargo’s network over three weekends.

Limited access to accounts

Impacted customers experienced limited access to withdrawals, deposits, and debit transactions for at least one weekend within a 60-day period.

Problem

Account access exceptions for Wealth Management customers

Through personal bankers, Wealth management clients typically have seamless access to perform large-dollar transactions anytime, including nights and weekends.

Large- dollar transactions available 24 / 7

Communicating restrictions on access to funds to this client-base was deemed unacceptable, as it could harm the bank’s reputation among Wealth Management clients. Even a single negative experience has the potential to result in the loss of millions of dollars in deposits.

Goals

Accuracy

Maintain real-time account balances to prevent overdrafts.

Full-service

Ensure continuous service for withdrawals and deposits for wealth management clients.

Continuity

Minimize the impact on personal bankers.

Prevention

Anticipating increased attempts, protect against fraud.

Compliance

Uphold full compliance with privacy and security regulations.

Discovery

Lead with interviews

Interviews were key to understanding stakeholder needs, user needs and flows, artifacts and data analysis.

In response to the potential for high-severity mistakes, I emphasized various research activities.

Due to the sensitivity and nature of the relationship with Wealth Management customers, personal bankers adequately represented client needs.

Data Driven

Reviewing data about previous transactions; timing, volumes, amounts, etc helped me understand staffing needs, technical feasibility, data needs and projected volumes.

Current State User Flows

Identified processes included steps for compliance, business rules and protocols for performing wire transfers, account withdrawals and deposits.

Surveys

Surveys helped me understand the personal banker experience, expectations, timing and requirements for interactions with wealth customers and other systems for actual transfer of funds.

Artifact Analysis

Supporting policies and procedures for overall compliance as well as how to handle escalations.

Technical Feasibility

Transfer of sensitive customer data is regulated and presented technical limitations, adding requirements to how the application ingested and transferred data to respectively start and end each migration weekend.

Compliance

Application Development

enterprise data

User Needs

Transactions

Maintain account balances through withdrawals and deposits.
Perform deposits to maintain account balances
Authenticate personal bankers and wealth management consultants
Real-time escalation for volume or other prevention-type thresholds

Oversight

Lookup transactions by account holder, transaction team member, personal banker or other transaction detail
Real-time escalations for transaction requests
Exclude transactions from updating live accounts
Correct details of transactions before live account updates

Customer Lookup

Lookup accounts to see if they are impacted / considered offline
Get an authorization code required for sending wires

Schedule

Signup / Manage shifts for weekend schedules
See who is on schedule for each weekend / shift

Design

SIte map | User & task Flows

In combination with the transaction and compliance team's knowledge, artifacts and existing systems provided us with much of the work we needed to define process flows for our future state.

Mockups

We leveraged existing systems as our model for how our starting screens would look and behave. As we progressed through usability testing, we made modifications that were specific to our Wealth Management customer and our needs during that weekend.

usability

Results

To adhere to NDAs for past employers and clients, applications have been re-designed using current tools and design patterns and have been updated to take advantage of current technology.

While we saw minor enhancements that could be made at the conclusion of the first weekend, stakeholders weighed the current risk against the risk of an error on a high-dollar transaction, concluding the application worked "good enough" and worried about asking development to make changes to a system that performed well.

Hi-Fidelity Solution Design

With the data migration spanning three weekends, we had two built-in opportunities for improvement. After the first weekend, we conducted usability and surveyed personal bankers that had a transaction, allowing stakeholders to assess which, if any updates would be made to the application.