Solving cashflow issues through Capital
0 → 1 Product, Systems design
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 cash flow 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.
Project details
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
Research & Findings
In order to understand how BILL’s internal teams were setup, I conducted stakeholder interviews with product and product adjacent teams such as Legal, Risk, Compliance and Customer experience teams.
To uncover where and how businesses are impacted by cashflow issues, I partnered with a user researcher and conducted external interviews with 12 Small to Medium ($1-$10M revenue) business owners, CFOs and financial controllers.
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Smaller SMBs and Sole props are especially vulnerable to cashflow issues because banks and other established financial institutions consider them to be risky.
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These SMBs tend to be on the smaller cashflow intensive businesses especially in the product and services sector. These businesses are highly mobile.
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The riskier a product, the more checks and balances need to be built, and that in turn slows down how fast we can ship or update the product.
Settling on Invoice financing as the first working capital product
Upon further investigation Invoice Financing stands out from the rest of the Working capital products evaluated due to the following reasons.
Risk factor is almost mitigated by the fact that BILL has access to payer’s payment history.
Receivers in the BILL platform tend to be cashflow intensive businesses such as inventory driven or product & services businesses.
Payer side products are heavily regulated since transaction amounts are large (1% of US GDP). Focusing on receivers would allow the team to build and refine payment flows.
Vision
For SMBs
Solve cashflow issues for SMBs by offering instant access to cashflow at competitive rates
For BILL
Build Invoice financing on an infrastructure that can scale and accommodate other working products
Pitching the vision to payments leadership
Stakeholder share out to highlight the opportunity to create a scalable component system for all lending products.
Defining scalability of a lending design system
Loan balance module
Loan details page
Identifying the right entry point for invoice financing in the payment flow
From user research I was able to piece together how small businesses think about solving cashflow needs.
The perfect entry point for invoice financing is actually before the business even realizes there is a cashflow need because BILL isn’t top of mind for any small business we talked to, for capital sources.
Simplifying the application process
Since BILL works with a banking partner for Invoice financing, I had to make sure that the application process followed the legal and compliance requirements of both BILL, and the banking partner. Once I was able to establish a strong working relationship with the banking partner, I was able to get their buy-in to refine and simplify the application.
Outcome → Access to cashflow in seconds
Outcome → Repayment on the go
Outcome → Lending design system V1
Outcome → Embedded capabilities
I led a jobs to be done workshop for cross functional alignment and there was a lot of interest from the stakeholders to scale this component-based approach beyond design components and embed functionality within the components to turn them into capabilities that can be offered as a service to other products within BILL.
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 all SMB lending needs.
This vision builds on BILL’s existing lending infrastructure, integrates payables and receivables workflows, and leverages Finmark’s powerful forecasting and planning tools to help businesses make smarter, faster financing decisions.
