Client: Standard Bank
Loans in 3 Minutes
Cutting a 32-day business loan process down to 3 minutes.
Situation
Standard Bank business clients faced a mandatory 32-day wait to apply for and access a business overdraft, at a time when urgent access to funds is often business-critical.
Problem & stakes
The existing process was slow, opaque and paper-heavy. Reducing it to minutes required a platform-agnostic redesign of the application and disbursement flow, not just a UI refresh.
My role
UX designer on the Business Lending team, embedded with tech leads, business stakeholders and customer-facing branch staff for the full discovery-to-handover cycle.
What I led
Led a re-imagination workshop and competitor teardown to shape the initial jobs-to-be-done and conceptual journey. Took the flow from low-fidelity wireframes (isolating edge cases and negative flows) through a high-fidelity prototype, sensitising new UI patterns for approval before handoff.
Collaboration
Ran the discovery workshop with tech leads and branch staff together; played back journey and prototype iterations to the business lending team at each stage; partnered with the technical team through user testing to keep design and delivery aligned; handed off to development via Zeplin.
Outcome
The prototype was user-tested with 10 respondents; findings were synthesised and folded back into the design before build. The shipped product reduced the walk-in application process from 32 days to 3 minutes.
- 32 days → 3 min
- Application-to-decision time for a walk-in business loan
- R460m+
- Disbursed to SMEs between launch (Sep 2019) and Feb 2020
What I learned
Validating complex, high-stakes interactions through structured user testing, not just stakeholder sign-off, was what made a 32-day-to-3-minute claim defensible at launch.
“I remember Craig's out-of-the box solutions and unorthodox thinking brought in a fresh perspective to our Business Overdraft solution, helping in the creation of a seamless process for the users.”
Digi-sign