NAB: Guarantor Suitability digitisation

Product DesignRisk & Compliancedesign system

What is it?

A mandatory risk and compliance assessment used within Business Lending to determine whether a personal guarantee is appropriate and compliant before it’s accepted. Completion is critical to meeting legal obligations and ensuring bankers have the information required to support responsible lending decisions.

Challenge

Historically this relied heavily on manual process and human judgement. The assessment contained complex legal and policy requirements, resulting in frequent completion errors, inconsistent data quality and significant rework. The experience was difficult to navigate, particularly for infrequent users, and compliance requirements had to be balanced with usability.

My Role

Lead Product Designer responsible for:

• End-to-end experience design
• Content simplification and optimisation
• Research and testing
• Accessibility considerations
• Cross-functional alignment
• Legal and stakeholder collaboration
• Developer implementation support
• System integration with the existing guarantees platform
• Design system contribution lead on a new horizontal radio component

Approach

• Simplified highly complex legal content while maintaining compliance obligations
• Introduced automation and guardrails to prevent common errors
• Designed validation pathways and contextual guidance
• Conducted multiple rounds of banker testing
• Worked closely with Legal and business stakeholders to refine language and workflows
• Created scalable patterns that can support future assessment types

Outcomes

• Delivered a digitised experience for a previously manual process
• Improved completion accuracy and confidence
• Reduced operational risk
• Improved consistency in assessment completion
• New horizontal radio component added to the design system to speed up banker workflow

Impact Metrics

Risk & Compliance Impact

• Reduced assessment error rates from up to 50% to effectively 0% through automation, validation guardrails and clearer content
• Improved data quality and consistency across assessments

Scale

• Processed more than 40,000 assessments in the first 6 months

User Impact

• Reduced banker rework and correction effort
• Increased confidence when completing complex assessments
• Manual entry fields from 9 to 0 for the happy path
• Converted a manual entry to drop down selection for meeting location after testing revealed bankers input full address in discovery but legal confirmed approximate location (i.e business branch, guarantors workplace) would be enough
• Faster time to yes for customers to get loans approved and executed

What this demonstrates

• Design leadership
• Risk reduction
• Content strategy
• Human-centred design
• Complex stakeholder management
• Design system contribution and accessibility considerations