Equifax Upgrade

Introduction

Brightside is a work benefit that offers employees a personal financial assistant. The assistant can help them find community resources, get access to special low-interest loans, and help them set savings goals for future emergencies. When signing up for the program, users are asked to link their credit report through Equifax. This is the final step in onboarding before they are introduced to their personal financial assistant.

The Problem

Equifax is switching the method used to authenticate users, from a Knowledge Based Authentication/OTP authentication to an DIT (Digital Identity Trust) + SMFA(secured multi factor authentication) link.

SMFA SMS link expires after 4 minutes so we need to design the SMFA Timed out experience. Getting them to resend SMS link is the primary call to action but we should provide a way out if they get stuck in a loop, KBA.

Because we support onboarding via Desktop we need to design the SMFA SMS link going to a page that tells the user to finish onboarding on their desktop if that’s where they started.

Its important that we have a “no fail onboarding” so if the user fails KBA we should never tell them that there is a fatal error, instead we tell them that we couldn’t link credit at this time and that we’ll fix this later after we introduce the personal Financial Assistant.

The Approach

Update data collection so that copy matches the new experience, this includes any consents the user will agree too.
Design DIT experience complete with error validation.
Design SMFA experience complete with Time out and KBA fallbacks
Design KBA data collection.
Design Fail and Success scenarios for credit linking in and out of onboarding.

The Outcome

Engineering and Product have chunked this work and started planning sprints. I was let go from Brightside during the development of this project, so I hope all is going well.

Written by James Sauceda

Connect with me on LinkedIn