Getting hardship funding to students faster
Students in financial crisis waited months for money they'd already qualified for. Most of the delay was one missing document.
- Role
- Product Designer
- Company
- Blackbullion
- When
- July 2021 – June 2023
- Result
- Evidence requests per case more than halved
Problem
30%
of all evidence requests were chasing a missing bank statement.
What I found
Collecting evidence was the bottleneck. Applications stalled for months while staff and students went back and forth over the same paperwork, at a point where students could least afford to wait.
Bank statements caused most of it. Nearly a third of every request sent was chasing a statement students found hard to produce.
A tenth of "evidence requests" were actually questions. The tool had no way to answer one, so the application simply sat there.
What we changed
Added Open Banking, so students could supply statements directly instead of hunting for PDFs.
Then rebuilt the Open Banking choice after testing. 60% avoided it because they'd never heard of it, so we gave it more visual weight and explained plainly how it worked.
Built a query thread that could reference specific documents, so a question could just be answered.
Result
Requests for further documentation more than halved in the first month.