Case Study · Coast Capital Savings · 2024
The Mortgage Renewal Tool gave Coast Capital members a self-serve path through their renewal — reducing advisor workload and meeting members where they already were.
Coast Capital's mortgage advisors had an existing internal tool to manage renewals on behalf of members, which served as the foundational model for what would become a member-facing self-service experience.
Digitizing this experience represented a clear business opportunity — capturing more incoming renewals by giving members the ability to move through the process on their own terms.
I joined as one of two designers after the principal UX Designer completed initial discovery, inheriting a solid research foundation and taking ownership from synthesis through to handoff.
Stakeholder feedback identified that the existing process caused delays in the lending pipeline — errors introduced during manual handling created back-and-forth between members and advisors that slowed renewals down unnecessarily.
Members had no visibility into where they stood in the process and no ability to act on their renewal outside of business hours.
With discovery research already completed by the principal designer, my focus turned to translating those insights into a coherent design direction. I led a competitive analysis, benchmarking how other financial institutions were handling self-serve renewal flows — specifically how rate selection, identity verification, and disclosure presentation were being approached across the market.
Operating without a dedicated digital product manager, we found it more effective to develop key screens early and work backwards — letting the visualisations surface gaps in requirements and helping us drive pace to meet development deadlines.
Usability testing was conducted with internal staff who held active mortgages up for renewal — a pragmatic workaround given budget constraints — which produced honest gut-check reactions to the design assumptions we were making.
The principal designer remained an active voice in design reviews throughout, ensuring continuity between the original discovery intent and our execution direction.
Design principles
The most persistent tension was balancing simplicity with regulatory disclosure requirements. The volume of required legal language posed a real risk of overwhelming members at the exact moment we needed them to feel confident.
Every iteration of the disclosure presentation required negotiation between what compliance needed present, what the experience needed to feel manageable, and what felt natural and relevant within existing design patterns.
Stakeholder alignment across product leadership, the development team, and compliance was an ongoing part of the design process — requiring us to frame decisions in the language of each audience and know when to hold ground on experience quality.
The Mortgage Renewal Tool launched in production, marking Coast Capital's first self-service digital entry point into the renewal journey. Document finalisation remains advisor-assisted for now, with the tool designed as a phase-one foundation built to support further automation as the platform matures.
Sharing the lead design role on this project sharpened my ability to navigate complex stakeholder environments and deliver at a scale I hadn't previously worked at.