Adding Loan Insurance to Online Mortgage Renewal

Context

When members take out a mortgage with Desjardins, they are offered loan insurance at origination. Some decline it. Later, circumstances change: a family grows, income structures shift, risk tolerance evolves. At renewal time, those members had no way to add loan insurance through the online renewal process.

Desjardins Financial Security wanted to close that gap. The mandate: allow members who had refused loan insurance when contracting their mortgage to subscribe to it during online renewal, without hindering the renewal itself. The path included a promotional aspect adapted to member data, and the entire flow was modulated by whether the member held a credit margin and whether that margin was already insured.

The Challenge

The central problem was giving out the right amount of information at the right moment.

Insurance is a touchy subject. People want to be well covered and have no surprises if something happens, but the domain is widely perceived as complicated, so the language itself had to be nailed down. Our first instinct was to reduce documentation as much as possible: keep the flow light, avoid overwhelming people, while staying responsible about disclosure.

There were structural constraints on top of that. The insurance subscription lived inside another team’s process and a specific design system, so it could not reshape the renewal flow around itself. And because the offer depended on the member’s situation (credit margin or not, insured margin or not), the conditional paths multiplied.

The Approach

We started by working out a solution that fit the constraints: integrate the insurance subscription inside the renewal steps, opening a dedicated modal for the loan insurance flow so members would not lose the context of where they were in the renewal. We deliberately limited the design to the fastest way to subscribe, so the insurance offer would never become an obstacle to completing the renewal.

We built an Axure prototype covering the whole process and ran a round of moderated testing with clients.

The results overturned our starting assumption. We had trimmed the documentation to avoid overwhelming people; participants told us they actually wanted more information, and sometimes before the moment it would formally be needed. They were anxious about the subject, and comfort came in the form of information availability, not brevity. Beyond that, the process itself was seen as easy to complete and not cumbersome.

We revised the design accordingly: surfacing information earlier and adding previews of what was coming, while keeping the fast path intact for members who did not need the reassurance.

I began the project handling both UX and UI. A UI designer was paired with me during the summer of 2020, and I also carried the accessibility validation for the project.

What the Work Produced

The main outcome was a validated flow and a corrected assumption. Testing showed that for an anxiety-laden subject like insurance, reducing information is not the same as reducing the burden; the design that reassures is the one where members can see the full picture whenever they want it. The revised flow kept subscription fast while making information available on the member’s terms.

I had to leave the project in August 2020, before development was complete. The flow was set to be developed at that point; I cannot confirm the launch first-hand, though to my knowledge nothing stood in its way.

Deliverables

• Conditional flow mapping across member situations (credit margin present or absent, insured or not)
• Integration concept: dedicated loan insurance modal within the existing renewal process and design system
• Axure prototype of the full subscription process
• One round of moderated user testing with clients (Lookback)
• Revised UI design in Figma
• Accessibility validation

Project period: February 2020 to August 2020 Client: Desjardins Financial Security (Desjardins Sécurité Financière) Role: UX and UI Designer (paired with a UI designer from summer 2020) Language of work: French