Accelerating Cashflow Lending for Small Business

Role

Service Designer

Date

2024

Industry

Banking (Digital)

Uplifting Westpac's cashflow lending journey to remove friction, reduce drop‑offs, and enable faster funding for small business.

The Challenge

'Business Advance' is Westpac's only digital pathway for small business cashflow lending and the challenge was that it was failing to convert customer demand into funded loans.

The journey was highly fragmented, with a clunky online application and a complex, manual fulfilment process behind the scenes. Customers frequently dropped out due to poor digital experiences while bankers faced labour‑intensive verification, slowing approvals and delaying access to critical cashflow for small businesses.

'Business Advance' is Westpac's only digital pathway for small business cashflow lending and the challenge was that it was failing to convert customer demand into funded loans.

The Process

Leading the service design stream of this program, starting with a current state discovery to uncover major pain points and inefficiencies within the journey, and co‑designing a target state that informed the business case and delivery roadmap for an improved cashflow lending experience.

See a sample of my process below:

The Outcome

What we found:

What we delivered:

The Learnings

Designing within highly technical systems: Learned to move beyond traditional journey mapping by integrating funnel data and code‑level analysis to build a precise understanding of where the journey process was failing
Grounding design in frontline reality: Strengthened my ability to design realistic future states through in‑branch observation and interviews with bankers, revealing operational constraints not visible in documentation alone.

Designing within highly technical systems: Learned to move beyond traditional journey mapping by integrating funnel data and code‑level analysis to build a precise understanding of where the journey process was failing
Grounding design in frontline reality: Strengthened my ability to design realistic future states through in‑branch observation and interviews with bankers, revealing operational constraints not visible in documentation alone.

The Feedback

“Therese did a great job diving into the BizAdvance project, gained a deep understanding of the problem space and created target state concepts that fed directly into the business case within Business Lending. Awesome work.”

David Madden (Design Lead)

"You worked hard and well. Your work was spot on, first time, every time. You delivered visually engaging collateral and articulated your messages well. You were essential to the success of our BizAdvance program, running the whole operating model. You were proactive in engaging the necessary interlocutors, organised great workshops and delivered quality work.

Aymeric Cabuil (Business Program Lead)

“Therese did a great job diving into the BizAdvance project, gained a deep understanding of the problem space and created target state concepts that fed directly into the business case within Business Lending. Awesome work.”

David Madden (Design Lead)

"You worked hard and well. Your work was spot on, first time, every time. You delivered visually engaging collateral and articulated your messages well. You were essential to the success of our BizAdvance program, running the whole operating model. You were proactive in engaging the necessary interlocutors, organised great workshops and delivered quality work.

Aymeric Cabuil (Business Program Lead)