Digital Personal Lending
The Project & the Challenge
The Digital Personal Lending project was a long-term effort for PNC's retail lending division to improve, and ideate on the future of digital personal lending for consumers.
The challenge of the project was two-fold: to first improve upon PNC's existing personal lending experience for retail customers, and secondly, to reimagine the customer experience of the future for personal loans.
Improving the Current State of Personal Lending
The project began with a heuristic review and usability testing of PNC's existing digital experience for consumers taking personal, non-collateral, based loans online. We found that the current digital experience for customers was confusing, didn't inspire confidence in the bank's lending processes, and didn't inform consumers about the most important steps and information they needed to feel secure in the lending process. when taking a personal loan.
As part of these evaluations of the current personal lending experience, we proposed a set of recommendations and service design blueprints for both "quick wins" and longer-term fixes to the online and in-branch personal lending experiences (shown below).
Reimagining the Future of Personal Lending
We then began to look at the future of personal lending. We started with a competitive audit of other lenders — both big banks and digital "fintech" startups — that are currently offering personal loans to understand what types of experiences and features other lenders were offering to consumers, and to see what differentiates a good loan experience from a truly delightful experience.
Testing Future Experiences
After exploring and sharing the current offerings for personal lending in the marketplace, our team met with our internal business partners to brainstorm on some of the concepts they were most interested in when thinking of the near- and far-term future of personal lending online. We narrowed the offerings down to several different ideas varying from very future thinking, like getting a personal loan on Alexa — to more practical-but-convenient, like having the bank pre-fill your loan application with the information it already has about you.
We then conducted a series of interactive interviews with consumers pursuing loans to get their thoughts and feedback on these concepts. We encouraged the consumers to tell us a story about themselves in various lending situations centered on the concepts we were proposing, and to imagine what was happening in several images that showed cnsumers in future lending scenarios.
We learned that consumers had lots of very specific feelings and thoughts about the personal lending experiences they were having, and this helped us refine and edit the concepts we had proposed. This feedback helped us define several insights on each of the concepts, as shown below:
Designing the Future Experience
We refined our lending concepts, based on the consumer feedback we received, and the design principles we shaped from our synthesis. We then designed a lo-fidelity prototype of the reimagined lending experience and tested the prototypes with another set of consumers who were looking to take a personal loan in the near future,
From this prototype testing, we iterated again on the design concepts, and delivered them to our retail lending business partners to prioritize on their 2018 roadmap.
Outcomes — A New Strategy for Digital Personal Lending
As a result of the project work, PNC's Retail Lending group was able to fold in several new, high-value features into their digital lending experience for their 2017 releases, have developed a 5-year roadmap for personal lending, and is currently developing partnerships with a fintech company to improve their out-of-footprint sales, based on our research recommendations and competitive audit,