A dual-portal system for quarterly CAR report management — enabling bank executives to complete compliance reports with guided, error-resilient flows while giving admins real-time submission visibility.
Overview
United Community Bank (UCB) needed a new digital system to manage their quarterly Capital Adequacy Ratio (CAR) reports — a critical compliance requirement that previously relied on error-prone manual processes and disconnected spreadsheets.
I designed a dual-portal system over 2 months: an executive-facing guided report completion portal, and an admin-facing oversight dashboard for tracking submission progress and bottlenecks across the bank's branch network.
The Problem
Quarterly CAR reports require executives across multiple branches to complete complex regulatory forms within strict deadlines. The legacy process was entirely manual — PDFs sent via email, filled by hand, returned with errors, corrected, resubmitted — a cycle that frequently caused regulatory delays.
Manual data entry across complex multi-section forms produced frequent calculation errors and missing fields that required back-and-forth correction cycles.
Admins had no real-time view of which branches had submitted, which were in progress, and which hadn't started — creating deadline anxiety and last-minute scrambles.
Executives completing reports had no contextual help, no validation, and no indication of what a completed section should look like versus an incorrect one.
Each quarterly cycle restarted from scratch with no historical data reference, forcing executives to re-enter static information and context each time.
Design Process
Ran a service blueprint exercise with admins and one executive to map the full current-state report lifecycle — from initial notification through submission and approval. Identified 11 distinct pain points.
Broke the monolithic CAR report into a step-by-step wizard with clear section groupings, progress indicators, and section-level completion states. Each step was designed to feel achievable in isolation.
Designed a real-time validation layer that flags errors as users type — not just on submission. Contextual helper text explains why a field matters, not just that it's required.
Created a submission tracker showing branch-level progress with status indicators (Not Started / In Progress / Submitted / Approved), plus a drill-down view to see which specific sections are incomplete.
Designed a system where static fields (branch details, executive info) pre-populate from the previous quarter — reducing re-entry burden and a common source of errors.
Outcome
The guided report flow with inline validation drove a 40% reduction in report errors in the first quarter post-launch. Completion time per report dropped by 35% as executives no longer needed to re-read instructions or guess at field requirements.
The admin dashboard gave compliance managers real-time visibility for the first time — eliminating the frantic deadline-week email chains that had defined every previous quarter.