In-house titling capabilities

Role: Senior UX Designer, MotoRefi  

Additional Talent: Product: Amal Abukar; Engineering: Dave Craine, Ricardo Kreyhsig; Subject Matter Expert: Cortni Harris

How might we proactively protect a key part of our business—titling—from a potential COVID-19 shutdown? 

MotoRefi relies on a New York-based partner company to process Power of Attorney (POA) documents and generate titling documents. Our titling team and product manager identified a major vulnerability in our ability to fund loans and serve our customers: if New York—the epicenter of COVID-19 in the US at that time—were to enact statewide shelter in place restrictions, we were concerned that operations for our partner company would be reduced if not entirely put on hold, thus drastically cutting our ability to do business. 

Our research of our current process uncovered three major problems to solve: 

• Our system relied on a POA being uploaded by the partner company, a capability not currently streamlined for MotoRefi users. 
• A POA then had to be marked “download complete” when it was received by MotoRefi. 
• Customer instructions and shipping labels directed the customer to return the signed POA to the partner company in New York. 

We began by creating a workaround so the titling team could directly upload and attach documents to a loan in order to share with the partner company. The old process was to email the documents to the general document queue (as if a customer was sending them), where a person would have to manually find and assign the document to the individual loan. Direct upload increased efficiency and accuracy; this was functionality we had hoped to improve in the future, and this task provided a great opportunity to test this out. 

Once the POA document was attached to the loan, we created a way to manually indicate “mark as downloaded” in our system, which would have happened automatically if the document had come from the partner company. Adding a button for this onto the document page fit seamlessly into the workflow. 

Lastly, we updated the CRM-generated shipping label to redirect the physical POA envelope to MotoRefi’s office, and we changed the written address on the label for consistency. We also updated the instructions in the transactional email the customer receives. 

We managed to launch this capability a week before MotoRefi made the switch to working remotely. Our titling team was able to have a rotating shift of one or two people coming into the office daily to receive and scan POA documents, reducing in-person contact and maintaining full functionality. 

In shipping POAs directly to us, we shaved a full two days off the time it took to fund a loan, increasing the speed of funnel throughput. This meant being able to include more funded loans each month, which is the key company goal metric.