context
Tala provides a way for people to borrow small loans in a fast, convenient, accessible way. Speed is one of our key value props. We underwrite & disburse instantly or same-day in all of our markets; building trust & providing immediate peace of mind for our users.
We deliver microloans through various payment channels — starting with M-Pesa in Kenya, and expanding to cash pickup & bank transfers as we localized across markets.
Goal
One of our most popular payment channels in the Philippines is Cebuana Lhuillier, a leading remittance brand, and the fastest option for our customers to claim their loan. At the time, we relied on a payments processor (third party) to process all disbursements for all channels — remittance cash pickup, bank transfers, and mobile money transfers.
We received news that Cebuana transactions would be discontinued through our partner by March 2019 — putting 25 - 50% of our business at risk. This gave us three months to find a solution.
Scope
I spearheaded our integration with Cebuana Lhuillier, leading partner evaluation & negotiation; product design & delivery; and post-launch analysis and iterations.
Partner Evaluation
There were multiple ways to solve the problem, ranging from integrating directly with Cebuana, to an aggregator supporting Cebuana, to backfilling with an alternative channel.
I led the analysis to determine our path forward by analyzing impact, technical effort, business effort, and risk across our various options. Ultimately, it came down to strategic upside, legal feasibility, and time-to-market. Working with our country GM, we negotiated with the Cebuana team to prioritize the project & ensure that we shipped before the March disconnection date.
Your loan is ready for pickup! The integration allowed us to more intuitively embed the claiming details into the app experience.
Product design & delivery
I worked with our Design, Research, and Engineering teams to validate the new flow to support this integration. We prototyped various UX options; and quickly narrowed to final designs and language through user testing & feedback from our customer experience teams.
As much as possible, I believe in colocated product teams. Especially for integrations, the value of working in-person and in the same time zone can’t be understated — not only as a product team, but with our integration partner. I made the case for two of our engineers to fly to the Philippines for 5 weeks, from testing & troubleshooting to release. (This saved us! Not only in aligning on partner requirements; but in fixing bugs quickly, completing tests in multiple environments, and getting this shipped with zero downtime).
Post-launch
We released on a gradual rollout, starting at 5%. I worked with our user researcher to push an SMS survey to users who received the new release, which allowed us to quickly catch operational branch issues and fix them over the weekend before we ramped to 100% — just in time for the disconnection date.
In the following days, I shadowed customers, listened to customer ticket feedback, and monitored system health in order to prioritize follow-on features across the next few sprints.
Before closing the project, I created tools for our team to continue using for future rails integrations; from a partner evaluation framework to recommended partner SLA’s.
OUTCOMES
Once we shipped this project, customers could claim their loan nearly instantly; and could view their tracking details more intuitively. This reduced our time-to-cash from a median of 1.8 hours to less than 10 seconds; and reduced customer service tickets from over 25% to less than 5%. Faster product, less friction — something to celebrate.
This was a tremendous team effort with our country leadership, engineering, user research, finance & accounting, growth & marketing, and customer service teams. For me, the months of effort & days of crunch-time truly reinforced how you can go fast alone, and go far together.
Cashing out with our lead engineer, who flew in for 5 weeks to get this shipped!
Across town, cashing out during a production test with JP, our QA engineer!