Masthaven Bank

Masthaven launched as a retail bank in 2016 and offers award-winning saving and lending products. Following a successful launch Masthaven wanted to take their digital platforms to the next-level to support the next phase of their growth. They engaged us in a wide-ranging digital transformation project to:

• Transform Masthaven’s broker experience through the delivery of a self-service broker portal that would give brokers access to generate quick quotes, instant DIPs as well as the ability to apply online and track cases in real time
• Deliver new B2C and Intermediary bank websites
• Integrate these new platforms with internal banking systems and a range of external APIs to deliver a cutting-edge self-service experience to customers and brokers

We kicked off the project with a discovery phase that brought together business analysis, user experience and technical expertise to identify the key strategic, user, business and technology requirements of the project. Following this, we rapidly developed interactive low-fidelity prototypes and tested these with Masthaven’s business stakeholders, real customers and brokers during multiple lab test days. This enabled us to build the prototypes explicitly around the needs of the end customers (savers, borrowers and brokers). These low-fidelity prototypes were iterated and re-tested multiple times to refine the user experience before they were signed-off.

With the low-fidelity prototypes complete, our UI design team began full colour design of the new interface. We challenged our team to design an interface that would delight the end users and exceed the best digital banking and portal experience currently available in the market. We utilised our user-centred design methodology and variations of these designs were validated with key business stakeholders and real users during the process.

Once complete, the prototypes, designs, user stories and acceptance criteria formed the foundation of the technical build.

The broker portal was delivered as a bespoke web application (Microsoft ASP.NET Core, Vue.js) with exposed service layers as RESTful APIs sitting behind the web application to manage authentication, business logic (including DIP and application logic), document generation, secure document upload and a number of other integrations. In addition a sophisticated MI reporting dashboard was implemented for Masthaven using Microsoft Power BI.

The B2C and Intermediary websites were implemented on the Kentico CMS. As a regulated business, Masthaven needed complete control of the site’s content and it was key that, not only should all pages and content blocks be completely editable by business users, but also that specific types of content were managed with their own bespoke workflows. For example, savings rate data needed to be managed by a particular team which only had access rights to manage this data.

The site also leverages the portal APIs to deliver affordability calculators and the Knowledgebank API to give brokers instant access to a fully searchable database of Masthaven’s lending criteria.

Jon Hall, Chief Commercial Officer and Deputy CEO at Masthaven, commented: “We recognise the power of technology and will continue to invest in tools that simplify and speed up the end-to-end loan process wherever possible. But the human element of any loan application is even more valuable to us. This is why we have developed our brand-new portal – to improve and enhance broker workloads so they can run their businesses more effectively, freeing up additional time to support customers face-to-face when needed."