Beneficiary Payment Platform
Client: Bank of America & EPIC Games
Role: UX Designer, Visual Designer, and Enterprise Design Thinking Co-Creator
Intent
Bank of America approached IBM with an opportunity to partner and create a payment platform to be implemented by their client, EPIC Games. EPIC Games is a video game and software development company headquartered in Cary, NC. They are the maker of the popular video game: Fortnite. Their core business lines include eSports, Support-a-Creator, and Unreal Marketplace. EPIC Games approached Bank of America to create a platform to pay the recipient of tournament and game winnings.
The mandate covered establishing a beneficiary registry to:
- Capture and validate beneficiary data (personal and payment choice)
- Provide ongoing management of data
- Enable global disbursements for core programs
- Perform tax withholdings and reporting services (a bespoke for EPIC)
Impact
Powered by IBM Cloud Identity, the Beneficiary Registry accurately and securely identifies, verifies, and captures payees’ relevant information to complete payments.
In 2020, the Gerstner Award was presented to IBM Americas, Bank of America team for transforming Bank of America’s cloud strategy and creating IBM’s cloud for Financial Services. Our work along with the other Bank of America engagements re-established IBM as a trusted innovator that could envision, engineer, and deliver a transformational and secure cloud platform for the FS Industry.
In October 2021, the global B2C payment platform went live as “Recipient Select.” It currently supports six payment methods for U.S. payments such as Zelle®, PayPal, ACH, and Check. For global payments, recipients can choose to receive their funds via PayPal, cross-currency ACH or cross-border wire. Future enhancements will include additional payout methods.
Read the full announcement and report here.
Our design thinking process:
Working in a cross-disciplinary team, we collaborated daily with the Bank of America team to understand business needs and financial regulations to create a user-centric experience that balanced simplicity with risk and compliance. We facilitated design thinking activities to identify our problem statements, create personas and identify their needs and goals, and map the key steps in the payment process, with the added layer of legal “tollgates” where critical information or signatures are required.
Design a better way for an Underage Gamer to self-identify and easily engage a guardian to receive earned payments without delay.
Design a better way for a Promoter Uber-Gamer to compliantly register (and their company) monitor and receive payments from their gaming activities.
Design a better way for a Gaming Company Marketplace Manager to understand the overall risk involved with gaming winners and identify cases that may require his intervention.
Mapping out the future experience:
To visualize the future state experiences with the complexities of legal regulations and requirements, we create complex user flows. As we continued to progress our user flows, we added micro-wires to provide high-level screen visuals. This enabled us to align with the client and development teams on what the screens may look like as we were in the process of designing the screens. Over the course of several weeks, we designed, validated, and delivered six scenario-based micro-frame user flows.
Scalable and reusable design:
For ease of rapid design, delivery, and development, we used IBM’s Carbon Design System. While the end solution manifests in a design custom for Epic Games, Carbon also enabled easy adaptability for multiple clients.
Our final delivery emphasizes three core themes:
Simplicity
Information is captured only once and leveraged throughout the experience
Focused on removing friction, unnecessary steps, and information requests
Increased transparency, simplified language, and applied tooltips in key areas of the experience.
Consistency
Unified the end-to-end experience for payment acceptance and validation
Created a single point of contact for the payee, versus dealing with multiple vendors or services
Flexibility
Emphasis on the reusability and scalability of UX/UI patterns.
Optimized the experience for the payee location.
Applied a systematic approach to design to provide branding customization