Financial workflows for enterprise customers

My first responsibility at Adyen was to take the Finance solution products and tools to the next level.

About the project

Notice: Due to contract requirements I'm not able to share any designs publicly.

My first responsibility at Adyen was to take the Finance solution products and tools to the next level.

The role of the finance part of Adyen is to serve information related to payouts, balances, deposits and reporting in a convenient way for two types of users: internal (employees from Operational Finance department) and external (Accounting and Treasury teams from our customers' side).

Process

Gladly, at Adyen you have full control of the process. You can decide on whatever works best for the team, for the business and customers. As a pragmatic person, I tried to make the most from the very simple process of:

Understand the problem,
Find and manage stakeholders,
“Who is the user” statement,
When possible, reach out to customers and organize interviews,
Iterate on designs weekly or bi-weekly,
Work closely with the front-ender and back-ender and implement small chunks that bring the most value first,
Test it with interns, employees and then with customers,
Roll-out to pilot merchants,
Follow up with pilot merchants and get more feedback,
Fix mistakes (they always happen), test again,
Go live with 5000+ customers across the entire globe,
Celebrate 🍻,
Check Looker and Zendesk,
Fix more mistakes, learn,
Release new version,
Celebrate 🍻,
Repeat.

Payout model & schedule

One of the most critical for our internal processes to reduce support congestion with similar or exactly the same questions from our customers. Before releasing this tool, many of our customers were reaching us out to help them change the payout model and schedule. It was purely manual work. We had 1,400+ tickets yearly related to this subject. It was expensive on both sides: the priceless time of our customers and the time of our support team, who could spend more time on more critical things.

After releasing the new tool, we had 4,000 page views with 730 users setting up payout models and schedule by themselves (~38% conversion rate). Manual requests to our Customer Support and Operation Finance dropped dramatically.

Balances overview

Same story here. We had 15,000 tickets in Zendesk that were related to “balance” topic. In order to get the information about the merchant’s balance, there were two ways: download a complicated report in CSV or reach out to the customer support or account manager. We introduced a new feature which is called “Reserve” that merchants can keep for the rough times (e.g. holiday sales) for refunds.

This is one of the self-service approaches I introduce to the Finance products at Adyen. From now on, all of these things can be changed by anyone with access and permissions. I helped not only save time and money but also increased people’s well-being by reducing their stress levels on managing those trivial support tickets.

Challenges

Stakeholder management

The most challenging aspect of working on these projects was stakeholder management. It’s not always perfect and it might be 80% of the struggle of a designer. Many people want to contribute, make decisions, but the stakeholders’ group has to be tight and solid. With a help of incredible design leads, head of product design and other people, I’ve learned how to tackle this problem and soon I was able to have proper people on board, run efficient and effective meetings, and the best of it – have a certainty that I’ve included people with different backgrounds to help me challenge and question many good and bad ideas.

Time to market

At the very beginning of my work, there was an issue: I didn’t know anyone, I was shy a bit, I hid behind my desk and worked on the project for weeks without telling anyone about my progress. Happily, with our design reviews and support from colleagues, I was able to share almost every step of my work to everyone. Transparency is good! Another problem was that my project manager believed that the product has to be perfect. That caused weeks, or even months, of working on thing trying to make it the best. After going life it appears that we’re not even close (even when we thought that “this is it!”). That mistake caused some problems but we have adopted a new way of implementing, and with baby steps, we introduced all of these products listed above in the matter of a few months.