Scheduling a Payment

From idea to launch

background

The Uplift user portal, like other payment platforms, has AutoPay as a feature. It can be turned on or off. Most of the customers opt into AutoPay because it’s easy, convenient, and they typically don’t have to worry about falling behind on their loan payments. I was in a unique position for this project because I was the product manager and product designer. I wrote the product requirements document for this feature and reviewed it with all the stakeholders, business leads, and tech leads for approval. Then, I designed the feature and held multiple design reviews with the same audience before handing off to the engineering team.

problem

Customers with AutoPay off were falling behind and/or were not paying within the 30 days past due (DPD) window, which means we have to report them as late to the credit bureau. It wasn’t that they didn’t ever want to pay us back, but it was more like they forgot to log in or they purposely wanted to pay later. The monthly due date is usually an arbitrary date. It’s the day a customer books their trip and takes out a loan with Uplift. A lot of customers get paid on a different day from their monthly due date, so they purposely pay a few days late with accrued interest. To them, the accrued interest on each loan payment was worth it if it meant they could pay on a different date.

We also discovered (in a different project) that most of our campaigns and efforts to encourage people to turn on AutoPay had marginal effects. The majority of customers opting out of AutoPay are purposely doing so to pay on their own schedule.

Scope

Phase 1 of this project was purposely a smaller project than phase 2, to confirm that customers truly wanted and would use this feature. Plus, it was a more manageable project that didn’t require too many cross-departmental resources. Phase 1 was customers with AutoPay off are given an additional scheduling feature to help with collections. Scheduling a payment (up to 30DPD) showed an intent to pay. The 30DPD window was chosen due to compliance restrictions and other complexities. At 31DPD, we have to report all customers as late to the credit bureau, and they end up in our pre-chargeoff efforts, which involves a third party company.

Phase 2 (out of scope) would target the root of the issue, which happens at the point of sale. We would allow customers to pick their monthly due date when they take out a loan, instead of trying to fix the problem post-sale. This would be a very large project, cutting across all teams and domains.

Success metrics

  • Customers with AutoPay off actually use the scheduling feature (target ~50%).

  • Customers with AutoPay off are skipping less payments.

  • Scheduled payments increases collection efforts.

flows and diagrams

Overview flow, scheduling flow, and canceling flow. Click on one of the images to view in a new tab.

Customer communications diagram. Click on the image to view in a new tab.

Testing and prototyping

The designs went through a few rounds of online user testing to finalize messaging, visuals, and the overall flow. After each iteration, I refined the designs further for more testing. The first draft of designs looked quite different from the final product since I ended up merging the existing “make payment” flow with the new “scheduling payment” flow due to user feedback.

lessons learned

The feature launched on October 20, 2020. I monitored the data closely for the first month. The few takeaways are:

  1. Numerous customers are indeed using the scheduling feature. The first customer to have scheduled a payment did so within 20 minutes of the release! There are some customers who are scheduling late payments each month, but the bulk of the scheduled payments are actually scheduled early.

  2. The success rate of scheduled payments is the highest out of all our payment types (manual, AutoPay, and scheduled) because there is more intent when a customer schedules a payment on a specific day.

  3. Because there are less failed payments, there are less reports to the credit bureau and better collections.