When a long-term customer walks into a branch, they expect to be recognized. However, because our interface didn't "talk" to the legacy data cores, every interaction started by asking for every data point—Name, Tax ID, and Address—even if the customer had been with the bank for decades.

The Business Problem: A Barrier to Adoption
Following our acquisition by FIS, we found that bankers were hesitant to adopt our platform because it forced them into "Double Entry". They had to manually re-type information that was already sitting in their core systems, ballooning account opening times and frustrating loyal clients.

Early discovery revealed that "finding a customer" meant two different things to the user and the system:

1. The Banker's Need:
Bankers often start with "messy" data—a partial name, a phone number, or an old address. They need a set of results to pick the right person from a crowd.

2. The System's Need
The backend data source is rigid. It requires a specific Exact ID for an individual or organization to produce a valid search result and link it to a new application without creating duplicate records.

The Hypothesis:
We hypothesized that if we built a unified search-to-prefill engine, we could eliminate the "Double Entry" friction, significantly increasing the volume of banker-assisted applications and solidifying our platform as the primary interface for FIS-core banks.

1. Association Intelligence for SMBs
Banking for Small Businesses (SMB) isn't linear. We had to surface the complex associations between an Organization and the Individuals (owners/signers).

2. Architectural Flexibility:
The search tool had to be a standalone "tile" within the Amount Hub, yet be responsive enough to be embedded in other areas of the product, such as a Queue Manager. Furthermore, it had to scale to support upcoming iniatives like product reccomendations.

I designed a unified search experience that moved the banker from Data Collection to Data Verification.

Intelligent Search:
Allowed for partial matches across Name, SSN/TIN, and Address.

Verification Panel:
A slide-out "Detailed View" that surfaced existing account types and business associations from the FIS core.

One-Click Prefill:
Once a record was selected, the system "pushed" the core data directly into the application flow, eliminating manual typing.