Payment System Design for U.S. Bank

I joined U.S. Bank Freight Payment Sector (previously known as PowerTack) to build global payment system for supply chain, which was processing over $18 billion dollars of B2B payments per year. The goals of my team were to make our business users' life easier by automating the process of invoices payments between business partners, that will avoid payment delays, optimize cash flow and eliminate billing errors, thus drive operational efficiencies and reduce costs.

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Challenges

The existing payment system was built on a framework of many existing components of diverse interface and technologies. Some older external services were being shut down, and will need to be replaced. The two new features I worked on are "Pay by Corporate Purchase Card" and "Pay on Due Date", both were facing challenges below,

Repetitive manual work on entering invoices Information, checking seller and buyer's credential and matching each payment transaction number
Error prone process with numerous data entry, various regulation and sensitive financial information
Troublesome inconsistencies on separated interfaces of different systems
Extremely high standards on accuracy because there is no room of missing a single penny
Time sensitive process, payments need to be made and posted on time

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Team

Me as the lead designer
The product manager, who's a seasoned banking and financial domain expert
A Business Analyst
A Project Manager, who oversee multiple projects' timeline, budget etc.
A Lead Developer, who provide technological feasibility feedback
A QA Engineer, who is responsible for conducting comprehensive test, and make sure the acceptance criterias will be met

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User-Centric Design

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1. Discover & Define

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1.1. Close Collaborations with Institute Users & Product Management

Having the user's best interests in my mind, I worked closely with the product manager to understand users perspectives and business needs. The product manager was a leader in his field and SME (Subject Matter Expert) with 2 decades of banking experience and expertise, I was very grateful to be able to collaborate with him and learned a lot from him. We had lots and lots of conversations/meetings/email communications with different institute users/stakeholders.

We identified 3 target user segments and created payment solutions to suit their needs,

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1.2. Leverage Detailed Business Documentation

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The Product Manager and Business Analyst created detailed documentations and specifications for the underlying business model and technology framework behind the new features. Getting myself familiar with the business rules, data entry type, range, dependencies, validations helped a lot on visualizing and interface and including dependencies/exception handling early on in my design process. That ensured that I could design the interaction and interface that covers all important different paths, scenarios and exception handling.

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2. Design

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1. Flow Chart & Wireframes

I created the flow chart and design the Payment Portal Dashboard to leverage robust data analytics to streamline processes and find efficiencies from point of origin to the last mile.

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2. Design Deliverables for Engineering Team

I created design mockups and detailed specifications for engineering team design requirements, got approved after several rounds of reviewed by all the stakeholders and addressed feedbacks till satisfaction.

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Implementation & Testing

The approved design requirements were handed to developers for coding.

Then the implementation was tested across devices on desktop and mobile browsers. Data accuracy was verified carefully end-to-end from invoices, payment confirmation, batch file, and a reporting system on the local and centralized database.

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Release & The Outcome

We released the new features of Pay on Due Date, Pay by Purchase Card on a roll-out plan to our institute users, the automation achieved significant efficiency on the payment process!

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