An improved reporting experience to help banking officers conduct efficient transaction monitoring
Redesigned the reporting experience for banking officers while migrating it from the legacy Extraswitch system to the new harmonised backoffice product, OpsCentral. The old system had slow downloads (up to 90 mins), hard-to-find reports, rigid pre-generated formats and many other usability issues. In this phase of the project we improved the existing flow with filters, summary insights, a cleaner table view, and favouriting which resulted in:
OpsCentral allows financial institutions leveraging the Interswitch network for payments to manage back-office operations like tracking settlements, logging disputes, generating reports and more all in one place.
These operations were previously scattered across many products. For example, Arbiter handled disputes while Extraswitch handled transaction reports. Interswitch created OpsCentral to provide a single access point for all transaction-related activities. This case study discusses the migration of “Reports” to OpsCentral and the redesign of the experience to better serve customers.
The Reports feature is a critical tool for financial institutions. It provides officers with comprehensive insights into transactions and enables them to access and analyse data that supports reconciliation, compliance, performance tracking, and strategic decision-making.
I began with analysing and synthesising raw data collected by the research team which included interview recordings and notes gathered during contextual inquiry to understand customer painpoints and identify opportunities for improvement.
There were many painpoints uncovered as Extraswitch was a legacy product that only had minimal, necessary design upgrades made to it in almost 2 decades of existence. A few key painpoints were:
Due to reports being pre-generated, to access a specific data set, customers must download whole reports and sift through plenty data to find what they need.
Reports could only be downloaded severally, which took up to 90 minutes for some user types, significantly affecting operational efficiency.
Settlement reports were split into multiple documents causing settlement officers to oscillate between documents to find information.
Customers could only view, compare and vet summary trasaction numbers by downloading and opening each report individually.
It took an average of 3-6 months to train new staff on how to use Extraswitch due to its complexity.
Specific reports were difficult to locate. Users sifted through hundreds of reports to find one.
After laying out user problems, it was clear that our primary issue was rigidity. We had our challenge: "How can we design Reports that adapt to users needs and that gives them control over what they see and use?" We wanted to make it possible for customers to query the platform however they pleased.
However, we knew that there were engineering constraints that could limit the level of flexibility we aimed to achieve. Because of this, I laid out 2 approaches that afforded users with different levels of flexibility. We shared these ideas with the wider product team so that together, we could decide what may be achieved in the short term and what to push till after the backend was made more amenable.
This idea kept the existing pre-generated reports format from Extraswitch but made it easier for customers to find, sort and download them. It also included usability enhancements that addressed many of the identified problems such as complexity with navigation, individual downloads etc.
This approach moved beyond pre-generated reports and the plans outlined in Approach 1 to allow users to explicitly determine what they wanted from reports. This idea also included allowing users to directly view reports in app, removing issues related the download only method in one fell swoop.
With approach 1, we were able to provide users with visualisation, much improved usability, streamlined reporting workflows and better operational efficiency. We tested our solutions with select customers before wider deployment and monitored usage with Microsoft Clarity. A few solutions and their impact are highlighted below.
This saved users from downloading whole documents to conduct comparisons of transaction data to account activity (debits, credits, disputes etc).
With up to 500 reports generated daily for banks, it was difficult for officers to identify role relevant ones. The new filters helped them get to what they needed much quicker.
We retained the table view from Extraswitch for continuity but upgraded the experience and UI. Customers were able to locate results quicker due to aids like category icons.
Favourite Reports allows users to bookmark key reports. We also used it to float relevant reports to the top for related user roles. These reports are stored in top-level locations with notifications sent when they are ready for download.
We added bulk download functionality and optimised the backend to cut download time. This helped combat a key issue from Extraswitch.
After upgrading the backend infrastructure to allow more flexibility and further monitoring and iterations, we will revisit Approach 2 to guage how applicable it still is and how to bring it to life for customers.
