Design system: PaaS
(Platform-as-a-Service)
In 2020, Brim updated its B2C only business model to also offer B2B solutions to other financial institutions by white labelling and rebranding Brim's platform - also known as PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service).
On April 1st, 2021, Brim Financial fully launched the first PaaS project for the Canadian Western Bank (CWB). The entire project had many deliverables – here I will mostly focus on the platform white labelling and rebranding parts, where I led the full design process.
Company
Brim Financial
Project timeframe
2020-2021 (8 months)
Role
Product Designer
Team
Marcelo Halpern (Lead)
Chandrakant Tank (PM)
Platforms
Web responsive
iOS & Android
Mastercard
Live project
Challenge
Right off the bat, the biggest challenge for this project was to organize, centralize, and have every single component in the entire platform linked to a customizable style.
You can read more about the Global Library project, where I tell more how I initiated Brim's design system when I joined the team in 2019, as that was the first step to start standardizing our own components and become the foundation for the PaaS project.
Results
CWB was the first business partner to use Brim's white labelled banking and rewards platform.
After this initial launch, it became incredibly easy and fast to replicate the changes to other brands. After CBW, 5 other institutions also signed the B2B deal with Brim, including CARP, Laurentian Bank, Air France-KLM, Affinity, and OnDeck.
Discovery & product mapping
For the starting point, I considered all of the platform services and features that Brim could offer and listed them into a Product Configuration, where the potential partner could customize the platform by choosing which services to include or leave out.
In the next step, I mapped all the areas that we would be white labelled to prepare our files – this includes statements, credit cards, the web Acquisition flow (card application and activation) and the web Portal (desktop and responsive). In this step, we also made sure to meet requirements from external providers and issuers that are linked to our production, such as RRD, IDEMA and Mastercard.
Design
This part of the process was dedicated to redesigning the interface of the entire platform, including the Acquisition flow (Application and Activation) and the full web Portal. The rebrand was created based on CWB’s brand guide, which includes changes on font, colours, images and component shapes. The goal of this step is for Brim’s entire platform to look like CWB’s – with addition of some overall improvements along the way. This was successfully achieved by using Brim’s libraries.
Since the rebranding part was just as important as mapping the customizable areas, the design happened almost at the same time as the product mapping. This was especially true for the Acquisition flow and the web Portal since they use the same interface components.
Rebranding comparison
Use the sliders to compare examples of the CWB rebranding of the same Brim Financial page.
Implementation
Since this project required a significant amount of design work to deliver in a short timeframe, the design handoff happened in parts. The agile method enabled us to start the development and the testing steps – at the same time as I finished the designs. As I delivered the completed files, the developers were able to begin working on the platform. Soon, our team could also initiate the QA testing of the completed coded sections. This process allowed us to make the implementation step much faster and efficient.
The implementation and testing took part on all web environments (Devs, UAT, Pre-release and Production), where we identified and tested the entire rebranded platform in terms of design and functionality. The entire project for CWB took 8 months from start to end, and it went live on April 1st, 2021.