The Challenge

Bring together Silicon Valley technology know how with the education mission of the university to build a center of innovation around financial services in the Central Valley.

The Outcome

Established a website to launch a center that is focused on creating awareness about financial services technology and bringing together financial leaders, university faculty, and students to learn and share best practices.

Focus

Silicon Valley has long dominated technology innovations in the state of California; however, due to the plethora of technology innovations, not all innovations get the same level of attention. In the meantime, the Central Valley (Merced and Fresno) is a growing community with largely underrepresented student populations who lack access to the kinds of innovations that Silicon Valley produces with its university-business partnerships.

The Center for Fintech Innovation (or CFI) is a joint partnership between UC Merced and a mFino, a financial technology company in Silicon Valley. The goal of the center is to help financial leaders understand best practices in the digital transformation of financial services that puts the customer first. Similarly, the center also is focused on leveraging the expertise of financial leaders as well as the UC Merced faculty to help prepare students for careers in the financial industry.

Process

Given that the entire project entailed establishing a center through the launch of newly designed website, I followed my product management process to devise a strategy to design and develop the website. As part of my process, I completed the following steps:

Strategy. Before engaging in actual design and development, it was important to research what was going on in the field. Out of that research, four different analogues were identified that informed the requirements.

Design. As part of the design process, a number of branding elements have been suggested from the logo to a tag line that emphasizes the work with students as well as the future of banking. Also, the color schema followed the UC blue and gold as a primary set of colors. The primary design principle was simple, modern, elegant design that provided members with new content and opportunities to network as well as ways to facilitate feedback from members including challenge areas that students can work on.

Product Management. After meeting with the primary stakeholders at UC Merced and mFino, a set of primary requirements for the web site were developed. The next stage was to develop a set of low-fidelity wireframes and prototyping to get a sense as to how to instantiate the user flows into a set of screens. Obviously, with agile, both the style guide and wireframes were initial suggestions, and with each iteration of development certain elements did change.

Website Development. After several iterations, the final web site was designed and developed. The web site is constructed to improve SEO and support accessibility. The structure of the web site includes a landing page or Home, a set of primary pages that are represented through the formal navigation, and a set of secondary pages about the initiative and a sundry content accessed through the footer.

The Deliverable

Established web presence for the client to raise awareness of the initiative.

Developed membership model to sustain the initiative.

Created opportunities for members, faculty, and students to engage in learning around fintech including a Challenge model for hands-on experience.

View the CFI Website