Loanscape for Credit Agricole Corporate Investment Bank

The situation

The bank needs to reinvent its loans financing business for corporate clients to stay competitive. Due to rise in digitisation, the bank needs to deliver solutions that are based on more agile and innovative distribution channels.

The challenge

The challenge was to create a new Ecosystem transforming the loans operational model while adapting to the risk, processes and compliance regulations of the bank.

Loanscape was then formed to gather these existing loan application apps and possibly new ones into an umbrella instead of operating individually.

Roles & responsibilities

Responsibilities

Research and UI designer

Collaborators

Business owners, Product owners and Developers

Time frame

March 2021-Ongoing

Team size

Started from 3 designers and increased to 6 in later 2025

The Processes

Discovery Phase

• Conducted the warm up and framing process with the users:

  • Bank middle officers

  • Business owners and

  • Product owners to understand the genesis of each products.

• Analysing the history and lifecycle of each of the product within the ecosystem.

• Building personas as means to get similar alignments and dive deeper into users behaviour when interacting with the app.

Identified key pain points

  • Lack of UX maturity in the business as most of the staffs are either business or tech oriented backgrounds.

  • Heavy reliance on using Microsoft excel from years of working, adapting the users to new system and software will be a huge challenge.

  • Structure of the UI/UX team to delegate and handle these requirements.

User persona & journey

Design phase 

• Key features of each product are then shipped based on MVP requirements set by the Product Owners and Technical leads.

• From front dev side, we realised the need to create “Loanscape design system” based off modifications from the angular framework. So we can get the tech side to ship our products faster and with similar UI components alignment

  • Developed low-fidelity wireframes and IA and verify with 8 middle officers from different loans department together with Business owners.

  • Designers have a Bi-weekly sessions, to analyse, critique and ensure our UI’s components and functionality are aligned throughout Loanscape.

  • The wireframes are then iterated accordingly through weekly workshops with the stakeholders.

High fidelity screenshots

Outcomes & metrics

The Loanscape products were launch successfully during first quarter of 2022

20% Reduction

20% reduction in product development costs over a longer period of time.

50% Faster

Loanscape design system helps the products to be released 50% faster with centrally managed assets.

100 Deals

Over 100 deals and contracts were processed via Loanscape ecosystem in early 2023.

800+ Users

High adoption rate of about 800+ middle office users and ambassadors using our products.

Further actions

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After each iteration launch with the product team, we ensure that the UI/UX matters and design debts are handled professionally.

My team of designers proposed:

1. User satisfaction surveys,

2. Restitution exercises and

3. Post MVP evaluation reviews

This is to gather feedbacks from users and business owners on how we can keep improving on the UX processes and break down silos across different teams within Loanscape.

It gives us the head start of what to prepare prior for the next Iteration launch. In terms of new functionality, UI component, transversal design alignment.

“Finally an effective centralised monitoring product that allows me to keep abreast of the statuses of my deals and contracts”.

Stephanie Mottais, Business owner for Structured Finance Group

“Clean design makes me trust the app with my loan tracking during daily processes”.

Samir, Brahmi, Ambassador for Corporate Loans

My Specific Contribution

As the sole designer in the ISAP (Information systems Asia pacific) region:

• Became the bridge between Paris and Asia pacific design team in handling UI design and creative feedbacks and ensuring a smooth design to dev handoffs.

• Evangelised the Asia pacific team on the UI/UX topics and sharing knowledge on the importance of our key roles.

• Responsible for the creation of two critical products in Loanscape namely the Covenant and Mitigant system as a way to track collaterals and loan regulations for the bank.

Lessons learnt

Key Takeaways:

  1. User experience processes is never a straight line. With many differing factors including the lack of time and people for research. Misalignment with Business owners decisions and the high tech dependency to push certain design and new features.

  2. It’s important for designers to pivot and be interchangeable to needs based on the outcomes of the business.

  3. Anticipate and predict things well by studying the habits of not just users but also fellow team mates. Such as working and communicating habits and also general expectations of the product.

  4. Test Early, Test Often: The 3rd iteration tested best because we caught major navigation issues in round 1 that would have been costly to fix post-launch.

  5. Progressive Disclosure Works: Breaking complex processes into simple steps with clear progress indicators reduced drop-off significantly.