What it's like to work in product design at Funding Options

A flavour of working at Funding Options

I've been a designer for over ten years now. Before joining Funding Options, I was working in an agency delivering digital products and services solutions for a range of clients, from young startups to global brands.

Taisa Echer, Senior Product Designer at Funding Options

I’m really proud of being part of the Funding Options team. 

Here’s why.

First, the product we’re building is a service that I strongly believe in and see the need to exist. Every experience we create helps the funding process become more accessible and simple for business owners, empowering them to make decisions that help them to build and grow their business with confidence.

Second, joining at an early stage was a really nice challenge (I was the second designer hired on the team). 

Having the ability to help to set – together with our previous design lead – the direction for our UX approach, research processes, be part of the development of our design system from scratch and create the basis for our products to scale was a big part of why I joined.

Working in such a fast-growing startup is exciting too.

We have a small team of designers, which allows us to get involved and work on multiple projects across the company. 

In practice, we design end-to-end solutions, conduct research, and keep iterating and improving on products like Funding Cloud, Funding Cloud Connect (our advisory platform), and the Funding Options website.

Keeping customers at the core

We focus on solving real problems promoting a smooth and reliable experience for our customers. Everything we create is driven by the needs of our customers – whether they’re new or returning. 

It’s all about delivering the best possible experience.

We dive deep in order to understand the challenges business owners face when looking for funding, what their needs are and how we can further develop our platform to help them achieve their goals. 

As a team we always make sure we build what our customers need, not what we think they need. We try to validate our  assumptions by conducting research and testing features, getting feedback from users and using data to help inform our design decisions.

Our focus is solving our customers' problems, and that's at the heart of our business culture across the whole company. Every stakeholder that engages with the design process, from engineering and marketing to sales and commercial, has the same passion for helping our customers to succeed.

Funding Options is made up of collaborative teams working seamlessly together: that’s what enables us to develop the best solutions. 

Our recently launched version of Funding Cloud is a product of this collaborative approach. We still have work to do but I'm very proud of what we've achieved so far.

What is Funding Cloud?

Funding Cloud is a single platform that connects businesses, lenders and partners. It breaks down funding barriers and facilitates fast, accurate and secure access to funding at scale. 

(It really is fast – the current record for a customer to get pre-approved offers is just 20 seconds.)

Our Open Banking connection means customers can connect their bank transaction information digitally, enabling us to make more intelligent funding matches. 

Open Banking – the future of funding

Our next priority is to continue making Funding Cloud a success: we’ll be focusing on refining customers' journey and experience, from completing the form and providing the documentation needed in advance to getting the most accurate offers.

We’ll also be improving the experience with Open Banking and documents uploaded to make it easier for customers and lenders to collaborate.

Watch this space!