Credit Karma's Debt Payoff Plan
At Credit Karma, we took a proactive approach to helping our customers piece together their full financial picture, and offered a personalized guided plan as well as an automated debt payoff plan for those struggling with multiple forms of debt.
My role
⏵ Product lead on field research study
⏵ Defined product strategy & roadmap
⏵ Defined product scope & requirements
⏵ Led end-to-end frontend dev & launch
⏵ Led Build Buy Partner for backend
⏵ Led end-to-end backend integration
Team
⏵ 30 person cross-functional team
Delivery
⏵ Frontend in-app user experience
⏵ Backend platform integration for financial data ingestion and bill pay
Problem
At Credit Karma, we conducted months of user research out in the field, sitting with customers to deeply understand their full financial journeys. Many of our users were squarely within the deeply subprime credit segment. They were barely staying afloat and struggling to juggle multiple forms of debt at once - credit card debt, student loans, auto loans, and mortgages. Where the debt problem had become so big and stressful, most simply didn't know where to begin to start chipping away, and were oftentimes paralyzed to take meaningful action. The problem was part education and part behavioral, and we aimed to take charge in helping our users overcome both barriers.
Solution
We built an experience that started with users connecting their key accounts (primary checking and savings accounts, credit cards, loans, and more). This allowed us to piece together their full financial picture - income, primary expenses and debt payments, and a range of other expense categories through transactional data. Then, we leveraged this data, along with credit report data, to present a guided plan - a reasonable plan - that would help them reduce the cost of their debt and get out of debt faster. Users could adjust criteria on the plan in a way that they felt was more comfortable and achievable, and they could visualize the impact of different scenarios over time. We also offered secondary plans that users might be interested in subscribing to, since we knew that they wanted guidance but with some level of control and optionality. Finally, as part of a beta program, we enabled users to opt into putting the plan on autopilot, and letting Credit Karma take care of the rest on their behalf, giving them peace of mind that we were on top of things, even adjusting to the inevitable bumps in the road.