Digital Disbursement

Transamerica was going through a shift in how it helped its clients. The old way — customers submitting paper forms, processors reviewing them manually — was outdated, error-prone, and slow. This project replaced that workflow with a digital experience built for both the customer and the processor.

Role

Sr. UX Designer (Consultant)

Client

Transamerica · via Synechron

Platform

Web application

Domain

Retirement & Insurance

I joined as a Senior UX Designer consultant from Synechron. Transamerica's product manager and business stakeholders had already spent considerable time planning and shaping the vision — including a strong pitch deck and existing documentation. My job was to translate that vision into a usable product, working embedded with the in-house team through discovery, design, and handoff.

About the project

A workflow that hurt customers and the business

Customers submitted paper forms that processors reviewed by hand, cross-referencing multiple internal systems. The cost showed up on both sides — customers waited days for status, and processors juggled tools to verify a single request.

Business strategy

Go completely paperless

The ideal end state — but to get there, Transamerica needed to build a foundational Disbursement Application that simplifies and automates the processing of paper disbursement requests.

Discovery

The existing process

Before designing anything new, we mapped what existed today — tracing how a request moved from a customer's hands, through the call center, into the processing teams, and back out as a resolution.

70% of the requests are mailed or faxed to the processing teams. As a result, this increases the time for the review process as well as increase risk of human error.

The over reliance on the call center as the main orchestrator of submitting requests increases costs to the business.

Due to high volume of paper documents, all of the submission need to be scanned for record keeping and the review process. The process is slow and inefficient.

New Vision

A journey-map workshop to anchor the rebuild

Together with stakeholders, we spent a few days in a workshop mapping the current user journey. The exercise revealed connections between numerous other departments, the project's true scale, and pain points buried inside the existing process.

The vision: digitize the customer document uploading process, remove manual processing effort, and let the system flag where a request is in good order (IGO) for submission. This reduces resolution time, removes error-prone hand-offs, and frees processors for the cases that actually need human judgement.

Persona

The requests' processor

Besides customers, processors are the other critical persona in the disbursement process. Customer satisfaction relies heavily on how quickly and accurately a processor can review and progress a request — so designing for them, not just around them, became central to the project.

HMW 01

Improve the document upload process

HMW 02

Improve communication between persona roles

HMW 03

Improve the quality-control process for every form field

HMW 04

Manage workflows between processors collaborating on the same case

Concept Exploration

The processor's queue

Today, processors review customer requests from a queue shared across the entire staff. Cherry-picking is prevented by routing, but that strips away context when a processor already knows a specific customer. We explored two directions to balance fairness with context.

Design Option A

Choose by request category

The processor picks a category they want to work on and pulls the next available request inside it. Preserves some specialization, but reintroduces the cherry-picking pattern the operation wanted to avoid.

Design Option B

Trigger from a shared list

The processor pulls from a single shared list — the system hands out the next case based on priority and skill match. Keeps the workload fair and removes cherry-picking, while still letting processors see what's coming

Dashboard Design

Processor's dashboard

The dashboard splits into two complementary views — the processor's personal workload and the broader team queue. Together they answer "what should I work on right now?" and "what does the operation look like today?"

Review Experience

The processor's review

We held daily workshops with the client, users, and developers, iterating on processor screens in real time. Everyone in the meeting had access to MIRO — turning a normally lengthy review cycle into a continuous, collaborative loop.

01

OCR-driven form fields

Displaying OCR'd documentation directly as form fields meant the processor never had to translate paper into data manually. The screen became the source of truth, with the original document available for reference.

02

Distinguishing NGO sources

NGOs (Not in Good Order) could come from a misalignment with business rules or from human error. We had to make that distinction visible to the processor — the right correction depends on the cause.

03

Action over information

Every review screen surfaces the next required action without burying the supporting context. Processors stay focused on moving cases forward, with detail available on demand.

Review Flow

Step by step, end to end

From first review through completion — each screen handles a specific moment in the processor's flow.

NGO Handling

Managing NGOs in context

When a request falls out of "good order," the processor needs to see why, what to attach, and what to communicate — without leaving the case.

Paperless

Replaced the mail/fax intake that drove 70% of incoming requests

Faster

Cases resolved without the paper-to-review wait baked into the legacy workflow

Clearer

NGO causes distinguished at a glance — business rule vs. human error

Collaborative

Daily MIRO workshops kept design, users, and engineering on the same page

Learnings

What this project taught me

1. When a workflow spans two audiences, you can't design well for one without designing for the other. Every customer-side improvement here was also a processor-side improvement — validation upstream meant fewer rejections downstream; clearer status meant fewer inbound calls; structured intake meant fewer ambiguous cases to triage.

2. "Digital" alone isn't the win. Putting a paper form on a screen would have moved the same friction onto a keyboard. The real shift was rethinking the entire hand-off chain so that the digital experience could carry context the paper one never could.

3. Embedding design directly in daily workshops with users, developers, and stakeholders changed how we worked. Decisions that normally take weeks of async review happened live in MIRO, with the right people in the room — and the team came out the other side with a shared understanding of why each decision was made.