The Problem
As of March 2019 Americans are struggling with $1 Trillion dollars of credit card debt, with an average of $6,200-$10,000 per household. Americans need help, but no one in the Financial Services space offers a tool flexible enough to meet everyone’s needs.
The average American checks their bank account 1-2 times a day. Some check even more; living paycheck to paycheck means every dollar counts.
The Hypothesis
Members who have revolving credit card debt will link/add their credit cards in order to see the credit card balances, payments due, credit health all in one place.
The Beginning
In late 2018 a lean team of one designer, one PM, and five engineers launched a test to validate the hypothesis. It was released internally for employee use and shared with select Members through their accounts.
This tool needed to be transparent about where the data came from, simple and easy to understand, and valuable enough to be something Members wanted to return to daily.
During the launch over 30,000 people connected at least one credit card account with the average just over 2. Initial engagement results showed approximately 20% of users returning the next week after enrolling.
Result: Everyone really likes this tool - we need to make it for everyone.
The tool was sun-stetted after ~6 months of use to evaluate the data, work on the code integration with the platform, and plan feature requests while the team sought to get the tool on the company roadmaps.
The Next Steps
Q3 2019 I was brought onto the project to take over as lead designer. I was tasked with making visual overhauls, re-thinking the information architecture for long term growth, developing new features based on the roadmap, and working closely with my engineering team to plan roll-out phases. This was a great project to work on as I was working in parallel to update the overall Member Account Experience to prepare it for long-term expansion with new UI and tools.
The Tool
The Credit Card Manager was born out of the need to provide Members with more information about where they financially stand today. This has become the ethos across the Member Account Experience.
Once it was clear this tool was valuable for our Members, we jumped deep into making it deeply valuable for our platform. Credit Card Manager became our flagship product to get members to "upgrade" their accounts to view more information about their overall credit health and debt. As it expands, it will interlock with many other tools and rely predicting and simulating what will happen when a user does or wants to do something about their debt.
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The tool offers the following features:
- See an aggregate view across all connected credit cards (Balances, Limits, Available Credit, Minimum Due Next 30 Days, Credit Utilization with action for 30% Recommendation)
- Individual Credit Card View – Balance, Limit, Available Credit, Minimum Due, Due Date, Credit Utilization – with action for 30% Recommendation, APR)
- Ability to sort cards by Upcoming Payment (Default), highest/lowest balance, highest/lowest APR
- Interlock with Debt Pay-down Simulator to increase Member awareness and action
User Testing
I worked with my Senior Design Researcher, Elizabeth Madsen, to launch some usability tests, and did some gorilla testing with a Member I was regularly interviewing for a long-term study.
“It's like having everything in one place. I love that. And seeing the total minimum payments is really cool too, because that's also something that could be taken as an action item in my mind – if I look at my budget and I'm spending $200 bucks on coffee at Starbucks well, hey, if my minimum payments are $81 and I put that extra $200 toward that on top of my minimum payments, then I know I'm going to chip away at that debt faster. This is a really handy tool.” –Sarah
Key Metrics We Measured
Enablement - consists of presenting the opportunity to Members who log in to Member Center the ability to connect their cards/accounts
By April 2020 we saw 200,000 members sign up for their new account experience to use this tool. We increased our MAU by 400,000 members over the first 4 months of 2020.
Onboarding – consists of getting users to sign the Bank Link agreement and connecting their accounts
Engagement – users who are onboarded will engage more with LendingClub
By April 2020 we saw that 79% of our Second Loan Eligible population opted-in to the new account experience to use Credit Card Manager after being declined for their loan.
Loan Origination – users who are onboarded have a higher likelihood to originate an additional Personal loan with LendingClub
Overall
This has been one of the most challenging and thrilling projects I’ve worked on to date. It is a tangible and impactful tool for everyone who has used it, and the future of this tool is bright.