Yield Enhancer – Turning Idle Cash into a Strategic Asset
Transforming Idle Cash Management with Yield Enhancer: This innovative treasury solution empowers businesses to optimize cash flow, automate liquidity decisions, and unlock higher returns on idle funds, ensuring financial agility and maximized growth opportunities. Our mission is to drive smarter cash utilization for a more resilient financial future.
Sector
Finance
Service
UI design, UX design
Year
2024
Project Context
As a product designer, I was tasked with addressing the inefficiencies of idle cash management for treasury teams. Yield Enhancer was born as an AI-powered solution to simplify workflows, provide actionable insights, and automate compliance monitoring.
Rooted in user research and iterative design, the project tackled pain points like cognitive overload, fragmented tools, and compliance anxiety. By creating an intuitive platform aligned with financial software standards, Yield Enhancer empowers treasury managers to transform idle cash into a strategic growth asset while ensuring clarity and efficiency.
Project Outcome
Yield Enhancer revolutionizes idle cash management by providing treasury teams with an AI-powered platform to optimize cash flow, automate investment suggestions, and ensure compliance. By integrating real-time dashboards, smart recommendations, and compliance monitoring, Yield Enhancer addresses inefficiencies and eliminates manual workflows.
The platform empowers treasury managers to make faster, data-driven decisions, unlocking the potential of idle cash while reducing cognitive overload and compliance stress. The result is a streamlined, intuitive system that transforms treasury management into a strategic advantage.
How might we transform idle cash into a strategic asset for treasury teams?
1.1 Defining the Problem
Managing idle cash is a persistent challenge for treasury managers. Despite their efforts, they often struggle to optimize cash utilization due to fragmented workflows, overwhelming data, and compliance complexities. Many teams rely on manual processes and disconnected tools, leading to missed investment opportunities, inefficiencies, and increased anxiety around regulatory compliance.
For this project to succeed, it was crucial to identify clear pain points treasury managers face daily. These insights served as a guiding framework for making informed design decisions, ensuring the final solution addressed the most pressing challenges effectively.
1.2 Discovering What Treasury Teams Need from Idle Cash Management
Research was the foundation of my design approach for Yield Enhancer. It encompassed a comprehensive exploration of treasury workflows, user behaviors, and the tools managers rely on. The goal was to understand their pain points and aspirations deeply, laying the groundwork for a user-centered redesign.
Through interviews, journey mapping, and competitive analysis, I uncovered key insights that shaped the design, enabling Yield Enhancer to deliver a transformative experience for treasury teams.
How Treasury Teams Currently Manage Idle Cash
Manually Tracking Cash Flow:
Treasury managers rely on spreadsheets and legacy systems to monitor cash positions.Fragmented Decision-Making Tools:
Investment decisions are often made using disconnected tools, requiring manual data aggregation and analysis.Compliance Management:
Ensuring regulatory compliance across different geographies is labor-intensive and prone to errors.
User Pain Points
Overwhelming Data Without Clear Insights:
Managers often deal with large amounts of raw data but lack actionable recommendations to guide decisions.Disconnected Workflows:
Switching between multiple tools and systems slows down processes and increases inefficiencies.Compliance Anxiety:
Navigating complex, region-specific regulations creates stress and delays decision-making.Missed Investment Opportunities:
Slow processes mean idle cash often remains underutilized, leading to lost potential returns.
Weighing Possible Solutions
After identifying these pain points, I explored two potential directions for addressing the problem of optimizing idle cash management:
1. Smart Investment Recommendation Tool
Pros:
Solves the clear pain point of underutilized cash by providing tailored, data-driven investment suggestions.
Streamlines workflows by automating cash flow analysis.
New to the market—few treasury tools offer AI-driven personalized recommendations.
Cons:
Requires integration with existing systems, which might delay implementation.
Could be challenging for users accustomed to manual workflows to adopt AI-driven suggestions.
2. Comprehensive Compliance Monitoring Tool
Pros:
Provides real-time alerts, reducing stress and potential penalties.
Ensures region-specific adherence to regulations, a major pain point for global treasury teams.
Cons:
Focuses solely on compliance, leaving the investment opportunity gap unaddressed.
May not significantly impact treasury managers’ daily workflows beyond audits.
Final Direction
After weighing the options and considering user pain points, I decided to design a comprehensive platform combining smart investment recommendations with integrated compliance monitoring.
This approach offered several advantages:
It addressed multiple pain points simultaneously—underutilized cash, disconnected workflows, and compliance anxiety.
It aligned with treasury managers' need for a holistic solution rather than isolated tools.
Research showed that 80% of treasury managers’ decision-making delays stemmed from a lack of unified insights, reinforcing the need for an integrated solution.
By focusing on this direction, Yield Enhancer aimed to streamline treasury management, optimize idle cash, and create a seamless user experience that treasury teams could trust.
1.3 Applying This Knowledge to Treasury Teams
Using the insights gathered, I developed detailed user personas based on the expected behaviors and workflows of treasury managers.
This project required me to consider two distinct user roles within the treasury management process:
Decision Makers – Treasury managers responsible for optimizing idle cash, approving investments, and ensuring compliance.
Analysts/Support Staff – Team members who provide data, prepare reports, and manage compliance workflows.
This dual focus helped me empathize with both groups and design for their unique needs, ensuring Yield Enhancer provided a seamless experience that streamlined collaboration and decision-making.
1.4 What I Learned from Persona Development
a. Ritty Zhai – The Experienced Global Operator
Ritty represents treasury professionals managing complex global operations. She values customized solutions and tools that simplify international workflows, as her primary challenges stem from navigating multiple currencies and global compliance requirements. To support users like Ritty, features such as customizable dashboards and advanced compliance monitoring were integrated into Yield Enhancer, ensuring flexibility and control in managing diverse markets.
b. Esther Schmit – The Resourceful Domestic Manager
Esther focuses on cost-effective solutions tailored to domestic markets, often facing limited resources and compliance constraints. Yield Enhancer was designed with features like cost-efficient investment suggestions and straightforward compliance tools to support managers like Esther, enabling them to optimize idle cash without exceeding budgets or regulations.
Developing these personas helped tailor Yield Enhancer to meet the distinct needs of treasury professionals with varying roles, priorities, and operational scopes.
2.1 Ideation
To kickstart the design process for Yield Enhancer, an Affinity Map was created to understand the project's scope and potential. This exercise focused on identifying non-negotiables, such as compliance requirements, user needs for clarity, and streamlined decision-making processes. Early ideas for features like smart investment recommendations, scenario simulations, and automated compliance monitoring were mapped out during this stage.
The affinity mapping exercise also helped define the primary user groups—decision-makers like treasury managers and task-oriented users like analysts. Understanding these personas early on provided a solid foundation for designing targeted solutions and informed the go-to-market strategy. This phase was essential in identifying pain points and potential solutions without restrictions, enabling creativity and exploration.
2.2 Refining Yield Enhancer
With a clear understanding of user needs and goals, the next step was to refine what Yield Enhancer would look like and how it would function. A major consideration was ensuring the platform seamlessly fit into existing treasury workflows without disrupting daily operations.
This led to the creation of a dashboard-centric design with features like:
Real-Time Dashboards: A central hub for cash flow monitoring and actionable insights.
Smart Investment Suggestions: Easily accessible cards tailored to user preferences and compliance rules.
Compliance Alerts: Automated, color-coded notifications integrated naturally into the dashboard.
The process emphasized working within treasury teams' established workflows while introducing intuitive features to optimize efficiency and decision-making. This stage bridged the gap between ideation and a practical, user-centered solution.
The thinking behind Yield Enhancer’s design was rooted in current treasury team workflows. Based on user behavior, treasury managers and analysts already rely on centralized dashboards and familiar tools to manage cash flow, compliance, and investments. Integrating Yield Enhancer’s features—such as smart recommendations, compliance alerts, and scenario simulations—directly into this central hub ensured a seamless adoption process.
This strategy was designed to encourage user adoption by allowing treasury teams to discover and utilize Yield Enhancer’s functionality during their regular workflows. By embedding intuitive features into familiar interfaces, the platform reduced friction, sparked curiosity, and minimized the learning curve for new users.
2.3 Understanding the Journeys
For Yield Enhancer, I was designing for two distinct user personas with contrasting needs: strategic decision-makers like treasury managers and task-focused analysts. To ensure the platform met their requirements, I mapped out user scenarios to explore how each persona would interact with the features.
These scenarios helped identify key touchpoints in their journeys, such as:
How treasury managers would review and act on AI-driven investment suggestions to optimize idle cash.
How analysts would use the platform’s real-time dashboards to monitor cash flow and generate actionable insights for decision-making.
By workshopping these interactions, I was able to develop the UI flow for Yield Enhancer. This process provided a clear starting point for designing essential screens and ensured the platform accommodated the unique workflows of both user groups.
2.4 Translating Journeys into a Product
The user scenarios were paired with detailed user flows to map out the physical interactions treasury managers and analysts would take when using Yield Enhancer. This included steps such as reviewing cash flow, exploring investment suggestions, and analyzing "What-If" simulation results.
These user flows provided clarity on the actions required at each step, helping me define the essential components for each screen. This process was instrumental in guiding the creation of wireframes, ensuring that every interaction felt intuitive and aligned with the workflows of both user personas.
3.1 What Does the Journey Look Like, Tangibly?
Low-fidelity wireframes were created to visualize the user flow for Yield Enhancer, mapping out the key elements and interactions necessary for its functionality. These wireframes illustrated how users would navigate through features such as real-time dashboards, smart investment suggestions, and scenario simulations, ensuring a seamless experience tailored to their needs.
3.2 Key Feature 1 - Opportunity Alert System
A major pain point identified during the discovery phase was the inefficiency of identifying and acting on investment opportunities. Many treasury managers miss valuable opportunities due to the overwhelming amount of data they need to sift through. The Opportunity Alert System takes this burden off the user by displaying real-time, actionable alerts for available investment options tailored to their specific criteria, such as risk tolerance, cash flow needs, and compliance requirements.
This feature ensures users don’t have to actively search for opportunities but still retain control over the process. By providing concise and relevant information at the right time, it transforms what could be a tedious, manual process into a proactive and efficient workflow.
Key Feature 2 - Maker-Checker Workflow
Yield Enhancer doesn’t just stop at providing investment opportunities; it ensures accountability and collaboration through the Maker-Checker Workflow. After a treasury analyst identifies an investment opportunity, the system automatically sends the details to a senior decision-maker for review and approval. This workflow fosters trust, prevents errors, and ensures compliance by implementing a two-step verification process.
Additionally, the system centralizes all communication and approvals, creating a streamlined and transparent process. Whether for a small cash allocation or a high-value investment, this feature enhances collaboration between team members while maintaining a clear hierarchy of decision-making. It’s equally valuable for treasury teams in large organizations and small teams needing structure and accountability.
These two features work together to address the core needs of treasury professionals—providing actionable insights quickly while fostering collaboration and ensuring compliance throughout the decision-making process.
Yield Enhancer seamlessly combines its two core features—the Opportunity Alert System and the Maker-Checker Workflow—to create a cohesive and efficient cash management process. When an investment opportunity is identified, an alert is generated and shared with the appropriate team members. Once the opportunity is reviewed, the Maker-Checker Workflow ensures it is approved by a higher authority, providing accountability and compliance.
The platform centralizes all investment-related details into a dedicated Investment Summary Page that is accessible throughout the lifecycle of the investment. This page is customizable to include essential sub-sections like Risk Assessment, Compliance Reports, Transaction Details, and Forecasts. By organizing all critical information in one place, Yield Enhancer eliminates the pain point of searching through fragmented tools or scattered communication, making the decision-making process faster, more transparent, and easier to manage.
3.3 Designs
Yield Enhancer seamlessly integrates into existing treasury workflows, offering users an intuitive platform for managing idle cash efficiently. The Opportunity Alert System provides real-time notifications on tailored investment opportunities, streamlining decision-making. Meanwhile, the Maker-Checker Workflow centralizes the approval process, ensuring accountability and compliance.
The platform's clean, dashboard-centric design brings together critical insights, investment details, and compliance updates, ensuring no crucial information is overlooked. Yield Enhancer transforms idle cash management into a proactive, collaborative, and streamlined experience for treasury teams.
4.1 But Was It Any Good?
After bringing my ideas and designs for Yield Enhancer to life, the next crucial step was to validate the solution with treasury professionals. To do this efficiently, I developed an interactive prototype in Figma that simulated the platform's key features, including the Opportunity Alert System, Maker-Checker Workflow, and Investment Summary Page.
With the prototype in hand, I conducted usability testing sessions with treasury managers and analysts. These sessions provided valuable insights into what worked well and highlighted areas for improvement, ensuring the platform was both intuitive and aligned with user needs.
Key Learnings
This project offered valuable insights into user-centric design and creating solutions within established workflows. By addressing the unique needs of treasury managers and analysts, I developed a platform that directly tackles their core pain points, such as fragmented workflows, compliance anxiety, and missed investment opportunities.
Having clear goals from the outset guided my design decisions and ensured alignment with user needs. Through user testing, I was reminded of the importance of seeing the product from diverse perspectives. Despite initial plans, incorporating user feedback was critical to refining Yield Enhancer into an intuitive, impactful solution that seamlessly integrates into existing treasury workflows.
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