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Capital One · Auto Refinance

Redesigning the auto refinance journey

Rebuilding a high-stakes application to win back mobile users

Role
Product Designer
Year
Q2 2022
Platforms
Desktop · Mobile
Industry
Consumer fintech
Impact

Mobile brought 2× desktop's traffic but converted far worse. I rebuilt the journey around trust: +7.2% sign-in-to-submit, +4% application-to-contract, worth ~$200MM in annual originations.

+7.2%
Sign-in to submit application rate
+4%
Application-to-contract (~$200MM originations)
26→37%
Finicity income-verification adoption
Problem

Mobile was winning the traffic and losing the customer.

Exit surveys with 1,000 drop-out customers and call-center interviews surfaced three pain points that set my design goals.

01
Emotional uncertainty
A big financial decision with too little reassurance.
02
Poor information hierarchy
Hard to understand the process or compare an offer.
03
No personalization
The flow didn't adapt to co-borrowers, self-employment, or multiple incomes.
Step 01 · Pre-qualify

More screens, less thinking.

One long, unpersonalized page with a confusing order for co-borrowers, overwhelming on mobile, where most people now started.

Pre-qualify before

Before

After

  • →+7.2% lift in sign-in → submit rate (top of funnel)
  • →+4.7% lift in sign-in → signed contract, end to end
  • →Became the new control for both mobile and desktop
Step 02 · Apply

Honesty beat the hard sell.

At the moment of committing to a hard credit pull, users hesitated, unsure what they'd actually save, and wary of a 'salesy' pitch.

Before

After

  • →+4% lift in application → contract rate at this step (statistically significant)
  • →≈ $200MM incremental annual originations and $3.5MM marginal NPV annually
Step 03 · Finalize

The last step is where people quietly give up.

Income verification (via Finicity) was confusing and easy to abandon, especially for joint borrowers, so adoption sat low at 26%.

Before

After

  • →Finicity adoption rate increased from 26% to 37%
  • →Exit surveys pointed to more bank options as the biggest next opportunity
The calls I made

The decisions, and what each one cost.

Physical vs. mental cost
Broke one long form into a guided stepper: more taps, less thinking. Completion rose despite more screens.
Honest vs. persuasive
Tested five ways to frame savings; the least salesy framing won. A plain comparison beat every persuasion pattern.
One flow vs. cohort forks
Kept single and joint borrowers in one journey with conditional steps instead of forking the application.
Reflection

Every screen asked for more trust than the last.

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. That work earned Capital One's “I am Giant” award.