Capital One · Auto Refinance
Redesigning the auto refinance journey
Rebuilding a high-stakes application to win back mobile users
- Role
- Product Designer
- Timeline
- Q2 2022
- Platforms
- Desktop · Mobile
TL;DR
Redesigned Capital One's auto refinance journey to earn trust at every step, lifting sign-in-to-submit by 7.2% and application-to-contract by a statistically significant 4%.
+7.2%
Sign-in to submit application rate
+4%
Application-to-contract (~$200MM originations)
26→37%
Finicity income-verification adoption
Context
A high-stakes journey
Auto refinance lets customers swap their car loan for a better rate and monthly payment. I led the end-to-end redesign across desktop and mobile, earning trust at each step through clarity and transparency.
Marketing
Direct mailers, EASE (app/website), Creditwise
Pre-qualification
Based on personal, vehicle, and loan info, we extend offers — no credit impact.
Offers
Options with new term, monthly payment, and APR.
Credit application
Hard pull to confirm the offer.
Customer portal
Title transfer and income verification when needed.
Approach
Exit surveys with 1,000 drop-out customers and call-center interviews surfaced three pain points that set my design goals.
Pain point 01
Emotional uncertainty
A big financial decision with too little reassurance.
Pain point 02
Poor information hierarchy
Hard to understand the process or compare an offer.
Pain point 03
No personalization
The flow didn't adapt to co-borrowers, self-employment, or multiple incomes.
1. Pre-qualify: From an endless scroll to a guided path
The problem
Mobile traffic nearly doubled desktop, but completion lagged on one long, unpersonalized page that overwhelmed users.
Before
The solution
I broke it into a seven-step guided journey.
After · Mobile
After · Desktop
Impact
- ↗+7.2% lift in sign-in to submit application rate
- ↗+4.7% lift in sign-in to contract rate
- ↗Became the new control for both mobile and desktop
2. Apply: Honesty converted better than a hard sell
The problem
People hesitated when committing to a hard credit pull.
The solution
Interviews showed people mostly wanted one thing: how much they'd save. I explored several ways to show it.
Explorations
Before
A
B
C
D
The unexpected winner was D — by not overselling the benefit, it read as honest, not “sales-y,” which raised confidence. I also made the hierarchy transparent that 99% of users pass the hard credit pull, helping people commit to submit.
Before
After
Impact
- ↗+4% relative increase in application-to-contract rate (statistically significant)
- ↗≈ $200MM incremental annual originations and $3.5MM marginal NPV annually
3. Finalize: Verifying income without losing people
The problem
Borrowers had to manually upload income documents, and joint borrowers had no way to verify income at all.
The solution
We partnered with Finicity to replace manual uploads. I designed the verification flow, plus a new joint-borrower path that hadn't existed before, inside Capital One's web experience.
Before
After
Impact
- ↗Finicity adoption rate increased from 26% to 37%
- ↗Exit surveys pointed to more bank options as the biggest next opportunity
What stuck with me
Every screen asked for more trust than the last, and the wins compounded — +7.2% submit, +4% to contract, Finicity adoption up 11 points. The through-line was never a flashier pitch, just telling people where they were, what they'd save, and what came next — work that earned Capital One's “I am Giant” award.