Designing the Foundations of Working Capital at BILL
Product overview
50% of all SMBs fail in the first 5 years.
Most of them don't fail because they lack revenue, but because they lack access to cash when they need it. Delayed payments, unpredictable inflows, and rigid expenses create constant cashflow pressure.
BILL Capital addresses this by integrating working capital into the payments network, with invoice financing as the first step toward making cash flow more predictable and accessible.
Role
Principal product designer
Responsibilities
- User research
- Concept testing
- Systems design
- Product design for web, iOS and Android platforms
- Prototyping
- Service blueprinting
Loans disbursed
625,130
Total loan amount
$1.9B
Revenue generated
+$51M
Background
In 2022 I joined BILL as the first designer in the newly formed Working capital team. The charter of the team was to build a portfolio of lending products that can be embedded within B2B payment flows. BILL moves around 1% of total US GDP (~$320B) annually through their systems so the scope of opportunity was massive.
Research & Findings
In 2022 I joined BILL as the first designer in the newly formed Working capital team. The charter of the team was to build a portfolio of lending products that can be embedded within B2B payment flows. BILL moves around 1% of total US GDP (~$320B) annually through their systems so the scope of opportunity was massive.
Businesses don't look for capital at times of need, instead they plan for it
They are often well prepared ahead of the cashflow crunch, with larger companies sometimes planning more than a year in advance. And during planning, they often settle on a prioritized list of sources for capital. For larger lending products like term loans, or line of credit, planning was the window of opportunity.
Speed to market was inversely proportional to riskiness
Lending products on the payer's side are heavily regulated and that translates to slower roll-outs and in-product experimentation won't be easy without regulatory oversight.
BILL's internal processes weren't setup to handle loan management efficiently
Internally, the teams were operating in silos and there was no internal system that could act as the single source of truth for loan statuses to teams such as operations, credit risk and compliance.
Settling on invoice financing as the first working capital product
In addition to this, my product partner and I shared an artifact we created which compared different business lending products against speed to market vs impact.
Select product names to learn more
Invoice Financing
A short-term lending product that advances cash against unpaid invoices, helping businesses access money they have already earned.
Our recommendation was to pursue Invoice Financing as the first working capital product for BILL based on the following arguments:
Invoice Financing is a low risk product for BILL due to availability of a robust internal payment database
BILL processes billions of transactions every year and so has a ton of high quality payment data internally that could be used to train and fine tune our credit risk models. From my experience working on the QuickBooks mileage tracking product, I learnt that high quality databases could offer meaningful differences to the quality of the model output.
It offers a path to build and scale into a loan management system
Since Invoice Financing is a lightweight lending product, the requirements for a loan management system is light [monthly repayments and collections], as opposed to heavier products such as term loans which need to deal with complicated use cases such as partial payments, early repayments, etc.
BILL can turn the 400,000+ receivers credit visible
Historically, receivers on BILL sign up only to receive a payment. A significant portion of these receivers are very small or micro businesses. These businesses often struggle to obtain loans from traditional financial institutions such as banks due to their size and credit worthiness. But BILL, with their proprietary transaction data can underwrite them for low risk lending products and provide much needed access to credit.
Pitching the vision
After securing leadership buy in to proceed with Invoice Financing, I wanted to get internal alignment from the teams I spoke to for my internal research on building a scalable loan management system. I created a design proposal document to gather initial feedback and followed that up with my vision for how the system would function.
Loan balance module
Loan details page
Refining lending partner requirements
In parallel to the alignment efforts, my product partner and I started working with BILL's external lending partner to refine their compliance requirements. For phase 1, we settled on a minimal application experience that would adhere strictly to the lending partner's requirements, with subsequent phases incorporating more usability enhancements. This approach enabled us to build a smooth working relationship with the lending partner and use the data we gathered from the initial launch to advocate for enhancements to the application flow.
Identifying the right entry point for invoice financing in the payment flow
As for identifying the right entry point for the invoice financing flow, from the initial user research, we found out that businesses plan for cashflow needs in advance and that they usually have a list of prioritized sources of capital. So the perfect entry point for Invoice Financing is actually before the business even realizes there is a cashflow need, as BILL isn't top of mind for them as a capital source.
Contributing to the Trinity design system
For building the loan management system, I partnered with BILL's design system team to define lending components that the working capital team could build and contribute back to BILL's Trinity design system. This approach would make it easy in the future to embed lending components directly within other payment workflows within BILL.
Embedded capabilities
This workstream sparked an interest from the engineering team on extending the design system components into experience applets or modules that have baked in functionality. I lead a jobs to be done workshop with cross functional stakeholders to identify key modules which could be turned into applets. Unfortunately this initiative had to be deprioritized due to scope.
Capital on the go
One of the key learnings I got from my days working on the QuickBooks product was how open small business owners were in using their smartphones to run their business. BILL had traditionally operated under a desktop-first model with a companion app. To quantify smartphone usage for the receiver segment, I partnered with the data science team to identify how many users accessed their invoice status from their mobile device. Since more than 60% of the requests came from a mobile device, I designed and proposed a mobile based invoice financing application flow. This was rolled out first as a mobile-web based application, and later was built natively across iOS and Android OS. Since launch more than 40% of all loans disbursed have been on mobile devices.
Future of working capital at BILL
Building on the success of invoice financing, I'm leading the design of a three-year vision for the future of lending at BILL, where the platform becomes a one-stop destination for SMB lending needs.
This vision builds on BILL's existing lending infrastructure, integrates payables and receivables workflows, and leverages forecasting and planning tools to help businesses make smarter, faster financing decisions.
