Collateral management for BNP Paribas
Making a complex FinTech product break into a crowded market
The Challenge
BNP Paribas is one of the world’s largest bank and financial service companies currently operating with a presence in 77 countries globally. This major European bank had a department which is specifically dedicated to the management of their clients’ securities, offering a wide range of financial solutions from custody to clearing. A few years ago, they decided to build a new collateral management solution to take advantage of a gap in the market.
Competition was fierce: JP Morgan and City Bank were the dominant players in an industry that moves billions of dollars every day. Breaking into this market required a good balance of business acumen (cost structure) and, above all, world-class user experience.
Team
Design
Binglu Gu – Product Designer
Vincent Driss – Visual Designer
Guillaume Kryslik – Visual Designer
Louis-Jean Teitelbaum – Lead Developer
Myself – Design & team lead
Development
3 front-end developers, on-shore
40 back-end developers, off-shore
- BNP Paribas
- FinTech
- Product Design
- 12 months
Exploration through prototyting allowed us to move fast, while asking the structural questions that define how a product should behave
Approach & Project
Because of the complexity and sensitivity of the topic, I needed to know exactly how the back-end operators, our future users, were performing their work. What tools were they using? How often? What for? We managed to gain access to a back-end facility for a few days, where my team and I could observe our future users in situation.
We completed this observation with a workshop, involving 12 key users to reflect on the issues of their current situation. This allowed me to draw a picture of the current application landscape and set our targets: what were the tools most used for? How can we do much better than them? The resulting diagram on the left was to become our compass when we created the user flows and screens.
Once the user research was complete, and main use cases identified, I decided to proceed to prototyping fast. Wireframes were made at a record pace to explore what was possible but also to identify what we did not know yet. This “exploration through prototyping” allowed us to move fast, with rapid, weekly iterations, until we reached a prototype robust enough to start writing specifications.
I also chose to launch the visual exploration in parallel, so that we could quickly land on visually appealing screens once the wireframes were ready and validated. This strategy paid off as we were ahead of schedule, which allowed to us to run a few “tests’ with our developers counterparts, based off-shore.
Offshoring development, a challenge
We quickly discovered that our front-end development team needed too much support for us to be happy with the quality or speed of delivery. I decided to re-integrate the development within my team, leveraging the budget surplus we gathered after we move so fast during the prototyping phase. Again, this bet paid off, as we ran into less quality issues, the code base was cleaner and we were also ready ahead of schedule.
Release
The product was released in 2019 and quickly grew a significant user base. It allowed BNP Paribas to accomplish their major objectives:
- Break into a very profitable market, in spite of the presence of well-established players.
- Create a new profit centre for the back-office division, usually tight on costs.
The business objectives were clear enough so that the design team could focus on what mattered: ease of learning and empowerement of the operators
We went through dozens of iterations to land on this screen. It aggregates everything the back-office operators needs: an aggregate of her positions and risk exposure, a semi-detailed list of her individual trades, with a possibility to expand on each to display more data. This is an example of how I see a consistent and robust information architecture as necessary to build sharp, useful and delightful products.