Portfolio Project 6: CIMB Bank

Background

Context

A banking client needed UI UX design & IT consulting services to resolve issues with one of their internal processes, which involved financial non-compliance and hence causing financial losses. The client, CIMB Bank, is one of the major banking group by assets in Malaysia and ASEAN. The client approached my team (consisting of my manager who is a tech lead consultant, and 2 designers, where I was the senior designer with 1 junior designer) to propose a design solution to resolve a major internal compliance issue involving their internal users, and for the design concept to be presented in the form of a software's UI UX.

As part of their usual operating procedures, CIMB customers could call the CIMB hotline to speak to a CIMB staff and manually initiate a financial transaction involving their CIMB account. However, over time, it was found that there were various cases of non-compliance from the CIMB staff's side, where they did not adhere strictly to the company's Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) during such phone calls, hence leading to fraudent or wrongful financial transactions.

Hence, the client wanted to develop their own internal auditing system to ensure compliance from their internal users, and hence prevent fraudulent or wrongful financial transactions, and also minimising financial losses for the bank. The system should also have the capability to mass parse audio recordings of the phone calls, as it would be too impractical & tedious to listen to each audio recording one by one.

Defining the Problem

Users

There are two groups of users involved in the existing system:

(Internal Users) CIMB staff, who are handling financial transactions via phone calls

(External Users) CIMB customers, who make these phone calls. The demographics of most of these customers are Indonesians and middle-aged, as they prefer a more personal approach when dealing with financial transactions, instead of initiating direct transactions by themselves on online platforms (i.e. website or mobile app).

Interview Findings

There were no UX research carried out in this case, as the client had specific requirements and wanted a direct design proposal within a short time-frame of one week.

Pain Points & Opportunities

❌ Pain Points:

Many audio recordings that CIMB compliance team needs to investigate and listening to each audio recording is very tedious & time-consuming

It is easy to get confused on which file is which

There are many SOPs that needs to be followed, and it is difficult for the compliance team to keep track of all the SOP rules, and which ones were adhered to or violated

✅ Opportunities:

An internal software system can be created to mass parse the audio recordings, and also have fraud detection features based on SOP rules specified by CIMB bank

Designing a Solution

Process

Together with my junior designer, we discussed with our manager about how we should go about creating the design concept to resolve the problems as stated above. We suggested that the files can be uploaded in batches, and the system should have audio parsing features to transcribe the entire respective audio conversation. I also suggested that the system should be able to automatically detect for compliance or non-compliance, based on the keywords detected in the transcribed script. Our manager confirmed that it is technically feasible and if else conditions can also be used to help audit for potential non-compliance for more than one SOP types.

Then, I delegated the UI design task between myself and the junior designer.

She will design the initial log-in and batch file uploading UI screens

I will design the remaining pages: list of all batch uploads, each file's transcription results and compliance level.

All of the hi-fidelity UI designs were designed in Figma and for desktop format only, as it will only be used by CIMB's staff for mass parsing purposes. The designs were all completed within a 1-week deadline.

Visual Deliverables

Log-in UI

CIMB compliance staff will first need to log in to the system with their Staff ID and password. If they do not have an account yet, they need to contact the IT admin-in-charge to register an account.

Batch Upload of Audio Recording Files

When the user logs in, the default page they will enter is the "Upload Audio Recording" page. On the left side, they can navigate to the Reports & Upload Logs tab.

As each phone call transaction will automatically generate a file, the CIMB staff can save all of these files together. Each week, the staff can quickly select and upload all the new files as a batch. Some phone conversations may not be in English, and depending on the auditing needs, the compliance team may also want the files to be additionally transcribed into English. If so, they can click the checkbox for this purpose. Then, the batch upload is complete.

Reports & Upload Logs - View All Batches

Once uploaded, or if they Compliance Team User does not have any new files/batch to upload, they can click on the next tab. It will show a list of all previously uploaded audio recording batches, as well as the details of each batch such as the upload date & time. There is also a batch-level overview on how many files within that batch are suspected to be non-compliant, and what the current follow-up process is.

The CIMB Staff can then click on the "Display All AR Files" button to view all the files within that batch, and see which files have high risks of being non-compliant. The Batch overview page also has filters to allow the CIMB Staff to do additional filtering if they want to search for non-compliant files of certain types of SOPs.

The Staff can then click on the hyperlink icon in the last column, which brings them to the full details page of the selected file.

Reports & Upload Logs - Detailed Page of Transcribed Audio File

The CIMB staff will be able to have a quick overview of the file's details and rule outcomes (compliant or non-compliant). The system rapidly and seamlessly transcribes the audio recording and specifically details which steps of the SOP were followed, and which were not complied to.

The staff can also listen to the audio recording again and also view the transcription with the highlighted keywords at the same time. At any point, the auditing staff can also write custom notes as part of the auditing and evidence documentation process.

Reflection

After the project was submitted to the client, I do not know of the final outcome as I was no longer part of my company due to various reasons.

Nevertheless, this was a very interesting project and I am very grateful to CIMB Bank for allowing my team and I to design a solution for their internal compliance users. I particularly enjoyed it as it was a project that was out of my comfort zone (usual SAAS-based design projects), and I had to really think out of the box and from various angles in order to solve the users' pain points. I learnt more about how a banking organisation works, and I understood and appreciated how different departments worked together in order to provide value-added services to its banking customers.