Solicitation Agent
Digital Transformation of a Financial Vertical
Overview
A web portal to efficiently manage M&A deal data, reduce repetitive processes and save time
My first client that I consulted for (while at g2o) was Wilmington Trust. Wilmington Trust wanted to up their game in the Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) admin business by building a Web Portal that would streamline the facilitation process (usually carried out by a Solicitation Agent) involved in a M&A deal and thereby, replace their existing repetitive and time-consuming manual process.
Client
Wilmington Trust (WT) is a premier provider of wealth and institutional services for M&T Bank, a successful bank holding company in the U.S. financial services industry.
Team
Over the course of the project, I partnered extensively with a Product Owner, a team of 8 Developers, a Business Analyst, a Subject Matter Expert (SME) and a Senior Designer to identify, prioritize, and execute on the problem spaces & features of the portal.
I also collaborated with UX Designers, a UX Engineer and a Content Designer to maintain and contribute to the existing design library for Wilmington Trust.
Tools
Miro, Figma, Jira
Timeline
January 2021 - September 2021
My Role
UX Designer
I joined this project at a time when the research phase had just ended. I served as the UX Designer facilitating the ideation of product concepts from the done research and creation of workflows, user flows, screen flows, low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes for this project.
I worked cross-functionally in an agile / scrum team consisting of a PO, Scrum Master, BA and 8 developers. I often presented ideas and prototypes to the team and the company leaders be it proposing a new feature, advocating for the importance of UX and accessibility or articulating the value a particular feature brings to the business.
Meaning
Who is a Solicitation Agent?
A solicitation agent is usually a trust or a financial agency that acts like a facilitator between 2 or more parties that are engaging in a M&A deal or engagement. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is the area of corporate finances, management and strategy where two organizations merge to become a new business. For example, Company A acquires Company B. Wilmington Trust would act as a Solicitation Agent. They would manage Company B's shareholder deal documents that need to be reported to Company B's counsel.
Problem
A manual, repetitive and not scalable process
The current problem with this process is that it is mostly manual. So we are talking about 100s of shareholders, 100s of back and forth email communications and 1000s of deal documents and excel spreadsheets - all in a single deal. And the team at Wilmington Trust engages in about 1000 such deals every year. They communicate to 100s of shareholders via email and also use DocuSign, to manage electronic communication. This process does not allow for scalability, is time consuming and creates challenges in monitoring and tracking of documents as multiple applications are involved.
Project Goals
Streamline the Solicitation Agent process
01
Facilitate scalability in the Solicitation Agent process
02
Provide clients with the ability to track and monitor transaction results in a timely, clear and accurate way
03
Provide shareholders with a holistic user experience
Solution
An internal facing web portal that creates a data framework to allow for the creation and tracking of dynamic documents (MVP1)
The portal called Document Solicitation and Response Reporting (DSR), is designed to act as the central repository to import, export, store, track and manage engagement data. It would be connected to DocuSign and an internal application that the team use on a daily basis. The below MVP is a small but crucial step in this big undertaking and is designed only for the internal employees at Wilmington Trust for now. This product was shipped in December 2021.
Create An Engagement (Engagement = Deal)
Internal users can create, edit and track multiple engagements simultaneously online instead of having to track each engagement on excel sheets and via email. Users are also prompted if they make a mistake by displaying alert and error messages.
Bulk Upload Recipient (Shareholder) Records
Internal users can bulk upload the existing recipient information excel sheet into DSR. This way users can upload data into a single application instead of the same data being populated into multiple applications. This helps in scaling the business, increases data consistency and decreases risk of operational error.
Create A Document Record
Internal users can create and edit a document record. Using API, a connection is initiated between DSR and DocuSign which then helps internal users in mapping fields onto the document record based on its corresponding document in DocuSign. This lays the foundation to capture shareholder responses in DSR.
Create A Recipient (Shareholder) Group
Internal users can create and edit a recipient group. This is where the magic happens! Users can then assign recipients to their respective groups and also assign the document records to these groups thereby associating the recipients with the document records.
Export a Formatted Report to feed into DocuSign
DSR creates a report to pull data from the application in order to add data to DocSign consistent DocSign’s format requirements. This would temporarily ease the burden of manually creating spreadsheets for DocSign uploads while the team continued to build a systematic solution for the long run.
LET’S DIVE DEEPER
User Research
Time consuming, manual process
The user researchers at g2o employed interactive sessions and qualitative research methods to highlight the pain points of the internal employees dealing with the M&A deals, who are the target audience for this MVP. The employees were nervous during deals and had trouble in communicating with 100s of shareholders and monitoring the deal. Below is a journey map depicting the existing Solicitation Agent process at Wilmington Trust.
User Research by g2o LLC
Approach
Agile Project Management
The project is managed using Agile methodology i.e. breaking it up into several phases / releases. The aim is to deliver the right product, with incremental and frequent delivery of small chunks of functionality. The team worked in 2-week sprints with scrum ceremonies like daily standup updates, product backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint review and retrospective sessions. This includes cross-functional teams collaboration, frequent customer feedback and course correction as needed.
https://www.tcgen.com/agile/product-development/
Product Development Process
A lengthy yet successful model
Below is the overall product development process that was created by the team and followed by them. This helped in making sure that we are covering every important step in the product development cycle. This also helped in cultivating a healthy team spirit and collaboration.
Workflow
From 50,000 ft to a 10,000 ft view of the Solicitation Agent process
We first started with drafting a 50,000 ft view of the internal user flow documenting the creation of a deal, collection of documents, distribution of documents and monitoring of a deal. This was the outcome of several discussions with the PO, a few business SMEs, UX Designers and tech leads. It helped us in understanding the bigger picture and then went on to focus on creating a 10,000 ft view, concentrating on the internal users’ workflow as per the release plan for MVP1.
Screen Flow
5,000 ft view of the internal users’ workflow
This exercise helped us in understanding some of the details and nuanced use cases / user stories for this MVP and connection with third party applications like DocuSign.
Site Map
The constantly changing North Star!
Given the complexity of the problem we were trying to solve, our information architecture was bound to change after every few sessions. But having one in the first place really help in navigating through every design and tech discussion we had.
Low-fi Wireframes
Multiple iterations to make the web portal customizable
Such wireframes helped in quickly creating multiple iterations of the MVP based on the Business SME’s pain points and having meaningful discussions around them with the PO, BA, and the Tech Lead. The designs became clearer after every set of iterations. These sessions were focused on finding a smarter way of doing things and making sure that the designs are flexible when it’s time to release to the client counsel and also customizable when other Wilmington Trust applications are connected to DSR in the future.
Hi-fi Wireframes
Perfecting the user flow in the process
The hi-fidelity wireframes were not a refined version of the low-fidelity for every use case. They helped the team in discovering intricacies that had been missed out on in earlier discussions leading to further discussions to perfect the user flow.
Detailed User flows
Mapping user stories to the flow
I worked on the detailed user flows simultaneously with the hi-fidelity wireframes, once we had more clarity. I collaborated with the BA in mapping the Jira story numbers to their corresponding user flows. This helped in creating screens for certain use cases that we may have missed earlier and also helped in tracking the story inventory for a particular sprint.
Design Review
UX sign off before testing in Cert
This MVP was released internally in December 2021 and has reduced the average time for each deal by 40 minutes. Time is money. Every minute saved can be used to engage in more deals and thereby increase the Trust’s business. This portal when established in the market is estimated to make a profit in millions of dollars.
Impact
Time is Money
This MVP was released internally in December 2021 and has reduced the average time for each deal by 40 minutes. Every minute saved can be used to engage in more deals and thereby increase the Trust’s business. This portal when established in the market is estimated to make a profit of millions of dollars.
Learnings and Takeaways
Communication with business and technology partners
This was my first time in an agile team with so many team members. During my partnering with the PO, BA and tech team, I realized that every party had their own language of communicating the same thing and it is so important to acknowledge that and bridge the gap.
Balancing the big picture vs feeding the development engine
There was a time when I had lost my way while trying to balance too much. I had to make sure that I do not forget the big picture while also having my designs ready for the next sprint. I worked on this gradually and got better at it with some help from my Senior Designer and PO.