Making credit risk rating clear for 600 banks
- Company
- Moody's Analytics
- My role
- Associate Director, UX; mentored a team of 5 designers
- Dates
- Feb 2022 to Nov 2024
- Team
- 5 designers, product owners, subject-matter experts, engineering
- Platform
- CreditLens, a loan origination and risk management platform licensed to 600 banks worldwide
- Tools
- Figma, Axure, Dovetail, Jira
Process
Understand
Interviewed bank clients; tagged quotes and clips in Dovetail
Define
Ran research workshops with SMEs, product owners and end users
Explore
Axure and Figma prototypes, tested with users
Build
Design story review and defect tracking in Jira through delivery
Measure
Clients praised the efficiency gains
The problem
Credit analysts use CreditLens to rate the risk of a loan, a dense, compliance-driven workflow with a lot riding on every decision. Risk rating ran as a wizard, and the system ran its checks in a fixed sequence. If an analyst needed to go back and change something in an earlier section, they had to step through every screen again to reach the end.
My role
I led the redesign of the entire risk rating experience and mentored five designers. I brought subject-matter experts, product owners and end users into research workshops and usability testing, and stayed with the work through delivery by running design story review and tracking defects in Jira.
Key decisions
Checks along the way, not all at the end.
I restructured the information architecture so the checks ran as the analyst moved through each step. With each section already validated, an analyst could go back to fix one thing and return straight to the final step instead of walking through the whole wizard again.
Data tables built for real work.
Analysts work in large tables, so I designed sorting, selection and bulk actions, including what happens when some actions in a bulk update can't run, so nobody loses track of which records changed.
Room for AI, with people in charge.
The research covered predictive analytics, and I explored how AI insights could support risk scoring while keeping the analyst's judgment, and the audit trail, in front.
The system
Risk rating patterns, data table behaviors and ESG components that carried into new products integrated into CreditLens.
Outcome
A redesigned risk rating experience shipped to a platform licensed to 600 banks, and new industry-leading ESG offerings. Clients responded strongly to the gains in efficiency.
What I'd do next
Test AI-assisted scoring with analysts to see when it builds trust and when it gets in the way.
Images
