SCOPE

Fraction first launched it's mortgage product at the start of 2021. Our initial understanding of the core user group came from analyzing products in the same domain space. But over the course of one year of funding, we had completed close to 150 deals and were able to measure key metrics that allowed us to establish a variety of personas for the types of users being funded through Fraction.

The first key metric that we had correctly hypothesized was the median age group of funded homeowners. We knew that an older user group will tend to have paid off most or all of their mortgage, therefore acquiring one layer of eligibility for the Fraction Mortgage. The median age for a success Fraction customer was 59.

Age Distributions (2021 Q4)

The second metric that gave us insight into our user group was the loan use-case. Understanding what the loan was being used for would communicate the primary reason homeowners look for a mortgage product with our specific features. We saw that close to 70% of homeowners were using Fraction for some form of debt relief. We had removed monthly payments as a requirement, and allowed homeowners to pay-off their loan at the end of the term length. Tackling high-interest debt with a Fraction Mortgage made sense for homeowners that wanted to make use of their home equity as a financial tool.

Use-case Distributions (2021 Q4)

The final metric that contributed the most to the creation of the broker dashboard was the percentage of successful deals through the various acquisition channels. We saw that nearly 60% of successful deals came from brokers.

Fraction had always been tech-first for the homeowner, empowering them to take control of their funding process and break out of the tedious and restrictive solutions that banks traditionally offered. But in that philosophy, we had neglected the importance of brokers. Brokers act as an extension of the homeowner, and are therefore an important user group in their own right. They also act as a first-line of quality control, sending potential deals that will often meet our product requirements.

With these metrics, we were able to revisit our assumptions and infer a new understanding of all the players within the Fraction pipeline:

Age

An older user group might not be comfortable interacting with digital products, and prefer to defer the completion of actions to a professional (broker).

Ease & Reliability

Brokers are familiar with a variety of mortgage products. They will have a better understanding of product fit for a given client's situation. Homeowners will therefore go to professionals when they’re not familiar with the domain space, and trust that a professional will have a better solution in mind. We also need to remember that mortgage products have to do with people's homes, making it a risk-heavy product.

Speed

It's mentioned above that close to 70% of homeowners were seeking some form of debt relief. We found that folks with heavy debt burdens tend to seek a solution fast. Brokers again provide that speed by dedicating time to push a deal through the funding process.

This new perspective made us ask a simple question.

How do we enable brokers to play a larger role at Fraction?

And so...

How might we help brokers move faster and more efficiently?

A platform that allows brokers to push deals forward without having to wait for Fraction.

How might we give a deeper understanding of the product?

Provide educational materials that help strengthen their understanding of the product, and in turn help strengthen the homeowner's understanding of the product.

How might we build trust?

Provide tools that remove complexities and doubts surrounding the product.

APPROACH

With our 'How might we's’, we could explore a set of features that directly contributed to tackling those questions. We then took our feature list and discussed the viability and impact with the stakeholders.

The stakeholders active in this project included:

• Sales - Were the top of funnel for brokers and homeowners, educating them on the product and driving them towards our application.
• Operations - Worked with brokers and homeowners during the funding process.
• Capital Markets - Provided industry expertise in the mortgage space, and completed underwriting of incoming deals.
• Engineering - Vital in early stage discussions to provide viability for design decisions.

The V1 feature list would include the following high-level features, with a host of secondary features that improved the experience of the broker dashboard:

1. Tracking an active deal and performing actions to push it along the funding process, automating events on our end to allow for brokers to move deals forward at their pace without needed to wait for us.
2. Creating a loan scenario calculator that would provide context and forecast the state of a loan after x many years. Allowing clients to see the full scope of their loan in any given situation.
3. Providing educational material inside a content hub that would house blogs and articles, as well as dummy documents that allowed brokers to prepare for the types of documents we'd be requesting from their clients.

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Tracking an active deal and performing actions to push it along the funding process, automating events on our end to allow for brokers to move deals forward at their pace without needed to wait for us.

This was the heart of the broker dashboard, providing a means for the broker to see the state of all their active deals and to push them forward by completing the necessary funding tasks. There are many nuanced decisions we made that facilitated communication for priority deals, a guided experience into task completion, and a way to provide context for each deal when managing multiple deals at one time.

Communicating priority deals

The very first task a broker must complete is the payment and scheduling of a home appraisal in order to verify the value of the property. Once the appraisal report is submitted to Fraction, there is a 2 week deadline placed on the deal. Appraisals are valid for 2 weeks, and if the deal goes over that time, then another appraisal needs to be scheduled, costing the homeowner extra time and money. This is something all parties want to avoid, so communicating these urgencies became a big focus of the dashboard. We did this by implementing a variety of components with the goal of visualizing those urgencies.

A guided experience into task completion

A big point of discussion revolved around guided or free form task completion. There was no technical restriction placed on which parts of the funding process needed to be completed first, and since brokers are power users, do we allow them to approach any part of the funding process they see fit? The conclusion we reached was heavily based on a previous dashboard we had built for the homeowner, that allowed them to complete these tasks on their own without the need for a broker. Because these two dashboards communicated with one another - in the case of a homeowner completing the funding process alongside their broker - it was clear that we would model the task completion after the homeowner's perspective. It was vital we reduced cognitive overload for task completion. Homeowners therefore received a guided, step-by-step process. They could only complete one task at a time rather than having free access to all incomplete tasks. This same model was applied to the broker dashboard.

Providing context for each deal

Brokers would be handling multiple deals at a given time. They may return to certain deals after days of inactivity and lose context on previous actions and events. We mitigated this friction by providing ample visuals and components that tackled this issue. Overview cards showing how far along a deal was in the funding process, a timeline view highlighting a history of completed and upcoming events, and a task view showing completed and upcoming tasks.

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Tracking an active deal and performing actions to push it along the funding process, automating events on our end to allow for brokers to move deals forward at their pace without needed to wait for us.

The scenario calculator was a powerful tool that provided education towards how a Fraction Mortgage worked, context to the costs associated with a Fraction Mortgage, and trust based on all possible forecasts and their results on the loan.

Our CFO created a barebones version of the calculator that demonstrated what variables were broker controlled and what outputs we would want to display. The image above demonstrates those inputs on the left and their respective outputs on the right. It was also important that we provide a way for brokers to share this information with their clients, so we created a PDF export option.

A future homeowner version of this calculator was in the works, but it would be drastically different in how it was presented. It would take a wizard approach and ask key inputs one at a time before displaying an output that had more context from a layman perspective.

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Tracking an active deal and performing actions to push it along the funding process, automating events on our end to allow for brokers to move deals forward at their pace without needed to wait for us.

This was the least complex feature in the broker dashboard. We had fantastic educational resources in place and we pulled those into a content hub. This would contain example documents, a broker kit that gave a full explanation of the Fraction Mortgage, and other one-pagers we had developed that focused on key discussion points relating to loans.

MEASURE OF SUCCESS

The primary metric we'd focus on is the time to funding. The current time to funding averages 12 days, meaning that it takes 12 days for a homeowner to receive their loan once their application has been approved and they've entered the funding process. We would want the broker dashboard to reduce that number significantly since it automates events on our end and allows the broker to move through the process with less friction than before.

Further success would mean an experience that is intuitive for the broker. We treated brokers as power users, and so allowed for greater with complexity in the tools we provided. Brokers consistently voiced a desire to get more out of our tools. But this also meant balancing complexity with usability. Through a structured testing process, we can further understand what experiences might cause friction rather than make their funding process easier.