Introduction

With concerns of identity theft and scams on the rise, Money Transfer Lockdown is a self-service security feature that enables Fidelity customers to place their accounts in a “locked” mode. The lock prevents unauthorized outbound money transfers without impacting other transactions The feature can be conveniently turned “on or off ” on Fidelity.com or in the near future, via the Fidelity native app.

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Fidelity Investments.

My Role

This project is ongoing and right from the beginning, I’ve been wearing multiple hats - gathering insights, creating low and high fidelity mockups, user testing, creative QA (both web and native) and finally, building out a backlog of design stories. I also collaborate with the product owner and analyst to shape product direction.

The back story

Late 2017, the squad was challenged to create a page on Fidelity.com that would provide customers a view of accounts that were restricted. Historically, these restrictions were placed for security or regulatory reasons and customers could only learn about it by calling the customer support line. Further research quickly surfaced that there were more than 1K  restriction codes that could be applied to a customer’s account. To scope the project, we decided to limit the first iteration of this page to list restrictions that customers were generally calling most about. 

Houston, we have an opportunity: The Pivot

To pull a list of relevant restrictions together, my analyst and I decided to listen to customer call recordings. While it was tedious work, this exercise helped to understand what customers were feeling and doing, and really hone in on the real problem.

To summarize our learnings:

• Starting September 2017 (namely due to the Equifax breaches) we saw a steady increase in requests to add restriction to accounts.

• Requests to remove restrictions increased again in December - when customers were trying to plan for the upcoming tax season.

• Between September and December, a subset of callers were reaching out on a regular basis to “temporarily” remove the restriction, take an action and then calling back to add restrictions back on their accounts.

What does this really mean:

This demonstrated that callers was leveraging restrictions to protect their accounts and alleviated concerns around compromises. This was key, since restrictions have primarily been used at Fidelity to impose a regulatory block on customer accounts, rarely as a security related protective measure.

While we started out with the aim to surface restrictions on the site, the analysis had now uncovered an unmet customer need that had potential of a greater positive impact – a true pivot worthy moment.

The Challenge

I organized a workshop with the business to communicate our findings and define next steps. Having heard where we were coming from, the business was completely on board with the pivot - ie. we were going to now focus on providing customers a security feature that they can proactively manage it from any channel. To make sure we were going down the right path, we decided to limited our experiment to protecting money transfers via the web channel Fidelity.com only.

This pivot turned out to be the first of its kind self-serve security product provided by Fidelity. The challenge now was to emulate, in the digital channel, an easy and customer-directed way of setting up and managing account protection.

Learning through experiments

Experiment 1: Workshop to production in 3 months (February to May)

With scope defined, I started working on the user experience early February. I paired up with a UI dev who quickly translated my pencil-sketches into an interactive experience (thanks to our design system), ready to be hooked up with the services. With this POC, we ran multiple rounds of usability tests with phone associates and customers (familiar with the restrictions process) to validate the UI, content and the overall experience.

Once the turn on, turn off and manage flows were locked down, I worked on the card that would provide a launch point for the feature. As soon as all the technical dots were connected, Money Transfer Lockdown was launched in May 2018.

Post launch, we kept our ears to the ground and gathered as much feedback as we could from all explicit and implicit channels. Insights from this analysis laid the foundation of our next experiment.

Experiment 2: Taking lockdown to where the customer is

The problem: Once lockdown was turned on, customers were forgetting they had placed accounts in lockdown mode via the security center. While we anticipated this behavior, it became a bigger issue with senior customers getting blocked out of the RMD payments, which were mandated by law. Solving for this issue was our next focus.

The solution: To make sure we had a clear understanding, I first mapped all touch points where a customer could be blocked due to a locked account. I then crafted a series of content, icon and experience indicators that would inform the user contextually about the lock and the next best action. Since money transfer was the primary touch point, I work with the money movement team to ensure that my content updates were incorporated into transaction flow.

Experiment 3: Do you know what Money Transfer lockdown is?

The problem: While we were seeing customers familiar with Money Transfer Lockdown, actively using the feature, the usage number were still significantly low. For the next experiment, we focused our energies (PO, analyst and the designer-me) increasing the awareness and ensuring greater conversion/turning on of the Lockdown feature.

The solution: I designed and A/B tested 2 options of a Money Transfer Lockdown Landing page.

In Closing…

Money transfer lockdown has been in production for more than a year now and currently, 112k customer accounts are locked and protected by the feature. Overall we’ve received positive vibes about the feature and are next looking to bring the feature into the Fidelity Mobile app.