Sentinels

Establish a user-centric vision in a complex business tool around financial crime fighting.

Sentinels is a tool for business started in 2020 intended for PSPs (Payment services providers) to facilitate transaction monitoring of their clients and ensure tracking of financial risks like terrorism financing, money laudering, brank fraud or conflicts of interest ...

Indeed, every year, between 2-5% of the world GDP is laundered and only 1% of the money is flushed out. This is the reason why Sentinels supports fintech companies by helping them watch their transactions. Originating from the Netherlands, Sentinels already fundraised 8.4 million euros.

Up to now, the startup has been focused on making state-of-the-art technology to prevent as well as it can : machine learning, API development and a technical setup that answers the best the legal requirements of each country.

If Sentinels technical approach is now close to the requirements and became a great plus for the company, they now need to take care of users needs especially in ergonomy and ability to understand and use the SaaS tool every day for recurring and painful tasks.

It’s during my master degree that I answered to this problematic with 5 of my classmates : Marion Chatelin, Estelle Kusiak, Floreine Rodriguez, Lucia Luengo and Benjamin Crémieux. Our brief :

« Build a user-centric vision to improve the tool for analysts, compliance managers, head of compliance and allow a better detection of business opportunities for their clients. »

Our work has been guided by the double diamond method : an opening phase to discover all users' problems, followed by a cropping phase on reels and immediates needs, then the second phase was about finding design potential solutions before iterate and test to keep only the better answers.

The 8 big steps of our project :

• Primary research to discover the fintech/regtech ecosystem, users, tools and competitors.
• Exploratory research with Sentinels’ users : interviews, observations, break up/love letter workshop.
• Insights analysis : processing the 262 verbatims collected with our research and grouping using the Theme - Epic - User Story framework.
• UX workshops : setting up a prioritization workshop then co-conception with Sentinels team (product, dev, IT, sales …)
• Usability testing with low-fidelity prototype showing the new main features of the tool, we realized two iterative loops of testing with users.
• High fidelity prototype : design and prototyping of our solution ready-to-use to guide internal product and design teams in implementing the new features, with a brand new design system more adapted and accessible for a daily use of the tool (improve colors, text sizes, contrasts, spacings …)
• Functional recommandations writing of a file presenting our strategical recommendations and all the results of our UX research to give work directions for later.
• Presentation to Sentinels' stakeholders (including CPO and CEO)

Summary, research with users had allow us to note problems linked to usability of the current tool, which was putting in background designing new features around finding business opportunities, so we decided to abort the second one for now. After we delivered a first research document, the UX workshops with Sentinels highlighted major pain points and helped us to define value and efforts required for each of them, and finally we decided to split our design phase in two distincts epics : one for analysts and one for compliance managers.

This work has represent in cumulative 3 months of implication and allowed Sentinels to define the product roadmap in mid/long-term with in particular a list of users stories ready to solution and deploy filtered by priority for users, and for product team. This complete work give them the ability to start implementing our new features which were really appreciated by our test pool. Most of the features we designed are now live.