Overview

Finastra is a multinational company that specializes in the creation of financial software that is then licensed to financial institutions around the world. This includes both products like banking apps as well as software that enables the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, currencies, etc.

As the start of a business-wide modernization effort, the design team decided to create personas for all of the business units in the organization. Every member of the design team was assigned to a business unit and tasked with creating the personas relevant to that unit.

I was assigned to the Treasury and Capital Markets (TCM) team along with one other senior designer. Over the course of four months we gathered prior research and interviewed SMEs and end users to create 5 new personas. 

Upon each team finishing their persona discovery process, I then led an effort to verify their findings using a quantitative questionnaire. This project in total consisted of 108 interviews and created 15 new personas.

Problem Statement

To modernize Finastra’s pattern of product development by starting with an in-depth knowledge of our users and customers.

Process

Discovery

This project had just begun when I started at Finastra. I was assigned to the Treasury and Capital Markets (TCM) line of business (LOB) along with one other designer. The first order of business was to familiarize ourselves with a few financial institutions and learn about how they handle and manage trading assets. We spoke with three SMEs who provided us with invaluable information and guided us through the process. One useful discovery was that users at these organizations can largely be sorted into one of four categories.

Front Office

Middle Office

Back Office

Other

We then spoke with the lead of the design team who worked with this LOB. She was able to provide us with prior UX Research that she had done including interviews, and contextual inquiries at multiple financial institutions across Europe.

Interviews

From all of this information, we were able to create a tailored list of interview questions, in addition to the interview questions that were being used by the larger project team. We used UserTesting to recruit participants from each of the four main areas of a treasury bank; front office, middle office, back office, and other. The graphic shown here displays the various interviews conducted for this project.

Understanding

From this information, we were able to create 5 new personas, shown here.

In addition, we considered what we felt were the most important areas for improvement.

Persona Validation

After the other teams had created their personas, I was tasked with creating a quantitative survey in order to verify our findings. I asked each team to consolidate their most important desired outcomes for each persona. Then, I formatted them such that they would fit into the following question:

“How important is the following statement to your job role, on a scale of 1 to 5?”

Each set of questions was then transferred into UserTesting.com where it was sent to 30 participants that met the specifications of each persona. To determine those specifications I met with each designer and asked for the most important aspects of each persona they created. These were then distilled into a screener questionnaire that would ensure the participants matched the persona in question. 

The participants were asked to grade each question on a scale of 1 (Not at All Important) to 5 (Very Important). After the responses were in, I met with each designer to review the results. Any question that returned an average score of 3 or lower was discussed in depth to discover what could result in the score.

Reflections

What I Learned:

It’s often difficult to get buy-in from various business stakeholders, especially at a company that hasn’t fully incorporated design into the fabric of their products. During this project I did encounter some of this, which made it difficult to get the information we needed. In addition, we had a particularly hard time finding participants for the trader role. Because of the B2B nature of our business, we were not able to contact our direct users. Additionally, sourcing these participants from third parties (like UserTesting.com) proved to be less fruitful than hoped, as UserTesting’s incentives aren’t as appealing to high wage earners. After looking into hiring them through a consulting firm, it was determined their hourly rate was outside of the budget of this project. Thinking about who the needed participants of a study are (and how we will contact them) in the early phases of planning is an important step to not skip as that can surface any issues like what we encountered. The project also taught an great lesson in that it is important to roll with the punches during a project. It may not be possible to get direct interviews with a certain persona but that doesn’t mean useful information can’t still be found. When we weren’t able to directly contact any traders we then were able to locate some people within Finastra that had previously worked as traders and were willing to sit for an interview. The data they provided was still very useful and applicable.

What’s Next?

After all of the work was done, a presentation was created for the company executives. Each business unit was given their personas and key themes. Many in the organization thought that this was invaluable information and were very grateful to the team for creating these. One business unit, Universal Banking, shortly after requested another persona be created for a small business owner which I created after multiple interviews.