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Great Design Is Both A Challenge And Opportunity for MCA Funders
What is design? Design is not how stuff looks, design is how stuff works. Steve Jobs. Design is not about how something looks, and colors, and effects. It's how something works. Uber. That's great design. iOS is great design. Is the chair you sit in right now super comfortable? Credit the designer.
This Video Gave Me The Chills
Designing For Market Share
The competition for ISO's will be heating up tremendously. There are many folks coming over from pay day lending as a result of the regulatory environment in that particular space. They all know the secret; "get some ISO's..." As I survey the landscape I feel that ISO driven funders are uniquely positioned to re-design the broker experience while magnifying enterprise value in the process. There's a simple way to both pre-empt challenges in potential broker regulation through design while alleviating a brokers' paranoia of putting their deals in a box in a cloud that it may not come back out of.
When you design an experience that serves to keep brokers sticky, you've won. Sticky = the broker is making more money. Larger ISO shops start running on higher margins and are able to re-invest winnings in more deal flow. The time savings compound on themselves.
Approach to Design
Design is problem solving. Do you provide tools to brokers? Some of you provide portals. I have seen some that function well but eat up way too much of a brokers' time. That's because the portal was designed to fit the needs of the funder first vs. his constituents. I've seen ISO portals that are downright offensive. Loads of features. Most not active, no clear direction, instruction, intuition, sight lines, etc. Why bother?
But what if the approach started with the broker and the brokers experience? What if every design decision was centered around saving that brokers time above all else? Design is making tough trade offs. What if you were to quantify the value of suppressing a need you have in service of filling a brokers' need and were to see that filling that particular need yields more ROI vs. just serving your own? Design is not about flashy tech. No one cares at all about that stuff. At Buynance, we knew folks could care less about how technical we really were. We went through great lengths to hide all the obvious technology as well as the background technology because sometimes technology can be offensive. But, through careful design we made it easy for someone to take an MMS photo of a stipulating document saving them steps. One photo + send > take photo, open e-mail, attach photo to email, send e-mail. We made it tougher for someone to solicit papers form business owners via the status quo... By making it super easy for them to send the papers to us. That's design.
Nonetheless, this post is inspired by the FinTechJunkie and will likely be a part of my next book. However, at some points soon I want to post about how funders who invest heavily in PPC can use data driven design to kick the competitions' rear end soon.
At the end of the day, a great designer can be obtained for six figures - a nominal sum if you're putting out $50 million a year.
