Project
Belian Finance
A web app for Belian's Fintech P2P platform to streamline the experience for SMEs and investors to get cashflow & investments opportunities
Belian Finance (currently BorderDollar) is a finance P2P platform who approached us when they were in their pre-product stage. Their aim is to close the underserved USD 6 Billion trade financing gap by assisting SMEs obtain immediate cash flow, backed by investments from both traditional web2 investors and progressive web3 investors using freight factoring/ invoice financing.
We worked directly with the client, facilitating the development of a solution for the fintech platform to create a seamless and efficient SME invoice selling experience for the business owners, and also to provide investors with an intuitive experience for making well-informed investments.
Overview
Problem
How might we design a seamless and efficient experience for web2 investors, web3 investors and SMEs in a way that cultivates confidence in the platform which enables them to make informed decisions, thereby managing their overall expectations and risk?
Outcome
We identified and prioritised essential features for a minimum viable product, MVP and helped Belian create a high fidelity web app solution for their services that they are providing.
Info
Role
UX Designer
Duration
3 weeks
Aug 2023
Skills
User Research
User Journey
Information Architecture
Visual Design
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Team
Kemin Ong
Jessie Kim
Solutions
Final designs & solutions
Over the course of 3 weeks, we interviewed multiple stakeholders, conducted competitive and comparative analysis. We created and tested high fidelity prototype of the main homepage, investors dashboard and SME dashboard. This project aims to communicate risk, manage expectations and to streamline the process for both investors to invest and SMEs to get funding.
01 Evaluate platform risks
01
A way to build confidence towards the platform to evaluate platform risks
One of the biggest concern of all users that is becoming more prominent now is the trustworthiness of the platform, users are worried whether there be issues like withdrawal freeze. To help users trust Belian more, we did the following items.
1
Statistics Page & Invoice Financing Awareness Page: Users can read testimonials, view past statistics, understand more about the process and the risk of invoice financing.
2
Investors Onboarding Risk Profiling: Risk profiling is to let investors understand their own risk appetite as well as for platform to understand investor's willingness and capacity to take risks.
3
Investors Funds Withdrawal: Traditional investors are able to do funds withdrawal anytime. As for web3 investors, the funds are already returned to them back to their crypto wallet when the money comes.
02 Offers investments of varying risks
02
Selection of investments with varying risks to allow for diversified portfolio within the platform to manage risks
For investors, their main aim is get the highest investment returns to while balancing the risk of the investments. They can balance their risk by having one high and one lower risk investment. To do that within the platform, Belian will provide a selection of investment opportunities with different industries and varying risks.
1
Investment Opportunities: Investors can view a variety of investment opportunities, they can filter by projected interest rates, industry etc.
2
Project Details: Investors are able to evaluate investment based on projected interest rate, industry, credit score etc.
3
Investor Calculator: Users are able to calculate projected returns with the investor calculator. They are able to do the calculations during the investment transaction too.
03 Streamline investment process
03
Streamline investment process for enhanced ease and convenience
Investors with a higher risk appetite have a more hands off approach towards investments where they just want to be setting it up once and enjoy the returns automatically. 83% of the interviewed Web3 investors mentioned the painful process of setting up a crypto wallet, they hope the linking process to be as easy as possible.
1
Auto invest : Investors are able to automate investments. They are able to set their preferred interest rates, industry and investment amount.
2
Streamlined access to crypto wallet: Users can easily access and link to their crypto wallets.
04 Evaluate viability of Invoice Financing
04
Intuitive financial solution which evaluate the viability of Belian's services to make well-informed decisions
SMEs want to quickly evaluate the advance funding amount, the platform fees if they where to use this platform to get immediate cashflow. Ease of use of business dashboard, uploading invoice and notification of important notifications are needed for an intuitive experience.
1
Invoice Calculator: SMEs are able to determine their advance funding amount and platform fees to swiftly assess all cost and make well-informed decisions.
2
Business Dashboard & Ease of uploading invoice: Quick overview of funds paid this month, outstanding funds, transaction history etc.
3
Notification: Notification of project approval and funds transferred. Notifying emails would also be sent.
Impact
Impact
In order to close the underserved USD 6 billion trade financing gap, Belian main aim is to use investors' funds to provide immediate cashflow to SMEs based on invoices. We helped Belian distill their stakeholders' and users' needs. We brainstormed, prioritised and built and tested the whole prototype.
01
For Investors
02
For SMEs
Provides immediate cashflow to SMEs based on their invoices.
Reduce the time significantly to get funding approval (as compared to getting a loan from a bank).
Offer cashflow options for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and individuals who might not fit the profile of the ideal loan recipient by traditional banking standards.
03
For Belian Finance
Validate the feasibility and product market fit.
Offer Belian's stakeholders new insights on user's perspectives (investors and SME) so that they can prioritise better and make better decisions.
Deliver high fidelity minimum viable product MVP.
Discovery Phase Research - Competitive and Comparative Analysis
Before we started on anything, we took time to understand what is crypto, what is Belian's business model, what is freight factoring, what is the other competitors in this P2P market
To gain a deeper understanding of what others in the market did in order to solve usability issues and find opportunities and gaps that we can improve on, we researched on direct competitors like Funding Societies and Smart Funding as well as specific areas like the OpenSea's connecting crypto wallet flow and SYFE's tools that help investors understand risk etc.
User Research - Interviews
User Interviews
To obtain qualitative information to discover beyond our current observations, we conducted 16 interviews with SMEs, web2/web3 investors and expert. The objective is to understand users' experiences and find out their decision making process, the main factors that would sway their decisions, their main concerns on investing/ invoice factoring with P2P platforms and to identify the user's likes and dislikes from competitor's platform to enhance the experience.
5
SME Owner/
Finance Team
4
Web2
Investors
6
Web3
Investors
1
Expert
Targeted Users
SME business owners/ finance team who handles invoices
Traditional/ Web2 investors - invests in anything except crypto
Web3 investors - invests in cryptocurrencies
Expert - used to work at Funding Societies previously
User Research - Key Insights
Key Insights from User Interview
The assumption we had before conducting the interviews:
SMEs don't care where the money comes from as long as it improves and help them with their cashflow
Investors want the most amount of profit in the shortest amount of time.
Through our conducted interviews, we discover the needs and main concerns from our main users groups - traditional investors, web3 investors and SMEs.
Investment Expectations
Main priority of investments is about earning money
Wary of high projected returns, would do due diligence and balance it with another more conservative investment
"If the portfolio has projected high returns, I would re-evaluate the risk level."
Number & Diversity of projects
Frustrated at the lack of projects
"(After some projects defaulted), platform had too few projects for me to park my funds. There were no opportunities to recover my losses."
Risk Evaluation of Investment/ SME
Needs to understand investment risk, projects could default
Wishes to understand the investment/SME though their financial statements, profit and losses and technical analysis before making the decision to invest
Risk of the Platform
Concern about the platform risk itself (Especially with couple of platforms like FTX, having the withdrawal freeze.)
Reliability of broker/brokerage, would be concern if broker is regulated
Web3 Investors
High Investments Expectations
Generally expects returns that are better than traditional finance market
Web3 Investors are used to volatile crypto market, expects high returns but also understand the risk involved
High Risk Tolerance
Relatively higher risk tolerance
Only be investing what I am willing to lose
"Potentially know that the money I invested in maybe all be lost eventually."
Risk Evaluation of Investment/ SME
Users requires more information about SME, finance report, writeup, white paper to understand what the business do before making the investment decision
Onboarding
There are a lot of steps usually, I understand that platform wants users to be responsible of their own choice
Generally painful process of connecting to crypto wallet
"Wallets should be able to connect on multiple platforms."
SMEs
Current invoice issues
Frustrated that the payment of invoices could delay up to 3 months depending on client
"Can't do much if clients/customers don't bother to pay us after chasing them for payment, can only refuse further services."
Concerns about Platform
Concern about the method used to chase their customers for payment. This will affect their customer relationships that may impact future cooperation. "Leaving such matters to third party may not be ideal."
Unsure about credibility and reliability of platform, may opt for more establish platforms.
Evaluate viability of service
Need a way to quickly evaluate whether SMEs should be using this service from Belian
When SME don't have cashflow problems, they require more nudging to try this service.
"What's the cost of selling these invoices?"
Source of Funds
"As long as it's not from illegal sources"
As long as amount credited is still in SGD/USD
Process - Define & Ideation
Persona & User Journey
To better assess and evaluate the research findings, we developed three personas and their respective user journey maps. These tools allowed us to identify the patterns and frustrations, as well as to map out touchpoints that highlight the current challenge from existing P2P platforms and potential opportunities for Belian.
Process - Define
Problem Statements & HMW
To distill insights and synthesize research data that we gathered, we prioritise and define the important actionable problem statements to gain clarity on the problems we want to be solving. We then listed the features/solution that would solve these problems.
Problem #01 - Traditional Investor
Problem #02 - Web3 Investor
Problem #03 - SME
Process - Feature Prioritisation
Feature Prioritisation
Our main goal is to make a minimum viable product, MVP so that we can test the market and users reaction about the idea before building the complete product. With the limited time, we couldn't do everything so we utilised the Impact/ Frequency prioritisation method to help us with our planning. We want to identify the features which would greatly affect the functionality of the Belian platform.
Process - Sitemap & User Flows & Sketches
Multiple iterations of Sitemap & User Flows
To help ourselves visualise how information and tabs should be nested and placed, sitemap and user flow is the crux in making everything work. We planned and tested the flow of Belian's website to the investor's dashboard and SME's dashboard page.
With the sitemap and userflows mapped out, we conducted a Crazy 8 Design Sprint to quickly ideate the main screens, we then compiled and discuss how to clearer organise the information on the screens, we then combine our ideas and did the prototype based on the sketches. This is an iterative process which involves the editing of user flows & sitemap such that they are aligned and tested.
Testing
Usability Test
To understand how easy is it for users to navigate and complete the task and for us to spot roadblocks, we conducted usability testing with 11 users (4 traditional investors + 3 web3 investors + 4 SMEs), giving them 3 - 5 tasks each. The goal is to make identify the problems of the whole user experience and searching for opportunities to improve on the flow and design.
7
Investors
5
Tasks
85.8%
Success Rates
4
SMEs
3
Tasks
75%
Success Rates
All users completed all tasks within the time goals. Some prompting was required for completing the investment application and uploading an invoice application. Generally, users felt the proposed solutions were very helpful and met their needs.
What Users Liked
Clean & Straightforward
"Overall, screens are very clean, not too many functions/ features that overwhelm the user. Very user friendly."
"Well organised & Easy to use"
Risk Profiling
(Onboarding Flow) "Good risk profiling to limit or recommend my investment options based on my risk tolerance."
Users Feedback
UX & Copy
Prefers to have an option to key in interest rate instead of adjusting the sliding bar
Risk profiling the aggressiveness sounds too aggressive.
"I'm comfortable losing all my capital, it's not like I came here to lose all my money LOL"
Lack of information
Lack of explanation on technical terms or potentially confusing terms (eg. funded %, factsheet, credit score, status, project maturity, desired quantum etc.)
Unintuitive Flow
Unintuitive placement of error message when there were insufficient funds.
Usual norm for the connecting crypto wallet for web3 are at the top right corner of the page.
Iterations
Iterations
Based on the feedback we've got from our usability test. Here are some of the more prominent improvements we added and changed to our solutions. Detailed version of the iteration plan can be found in the full Usability Report.
Investor Calculator
Problem:
Information unclear whether it's for SGD or USDC
Problem:
Unable to ensure slider accuracy, lack of input box
Product Detail Page
Problem:
Need credit score to gauge credibility of the company or their likeliness to default
Problem:
Unclear of technical terms listed
Investment Transaction Page
Problem:
Unclear input box of investment amount
Problem:
Available funds are unclear
Opportunity:
Additional project information calculation at the side that will adjust as the investor change the amount in the Invest Amount input box. This is to help investor decide how much to invest.
Auto-invest Page
Problem:
Unable to ensure slider accuracy, lack of input box
Problem:
Unable to select more than one industry
Problem:
Unable to access previous saved preferences
Connect Wallet
Problem:
Connect crypto wallet is not at the usual placing as seen on the other crypto platforms
Retrospective
Project Takeaway
Deciding on which platform together with the stakeholder
While deciding on which platform (desktop or mobile app) we should focus on due to the limited time we have, we discussed and decided together with Belian's stakeholder and these are the points we considered:
Desktop app with responsiveness:
SMEs and their finance personnel would be accessing Belian's platform during office hours and most likely accessing it on the desktop.
Most web3 platforms uses desktop, so web3 investors would also be used to using desktop for web3 related
Mobile app or Responsive website:
Traditional Investors would most likely use mobile app or mobile friendly website/ responsive website to access their account. We will need to cater for that in the near future.
Fonts for a fintech product
Initially, Belian has a set of font that they use loosely: Playfair Display (heading) x Montserrat (body)
For fintech product, the font needs to show clarity, clean and sleek, "no-fluff, cut the chase, to the point" kind of feel, something like a san-serif with good readability.
Playfair Display is on the theme of elegant, feminine and dramatic, more for fashion or editorial field instead of fintech.
I suggested Montserrat (heading) x Source Sans Pro (body) and did some mockup for the difference between the fonts. After some comparison and consideration, Jackie took up the suggestion and thanked us! :)