World Bank (IFC)
ROLE
Designing a Financial Decision-Making Platform for Executive Loan Valuation
Overview
In 2023, I joined the World Bank Group’s IT team in Washington, D.C. during a broader institutional effort to modernize internal systems, databases, and financial tools. My primary responsibility was to lead the design of a new internal platform used by Senior Portfolio Managers at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to conduct quarterly loan valuations — a mission-critical process that informs executive financial reporting and institutional records across the World Bank Group.
In parallel, I was tasked with improving the usability and design consistency of three existing internal applications while establishing a shared component library to support multiple concurrent projects.
THE OPERATIONAL CHALLENGE
Quarterly loan valuation at IFC was a highly manual, fragmented process.
Senior Portfolio Managers were required to:
• Navigate multiple disconnected databases
• Reconcile data across departments
• Manually re-enter and validate information
• Coordinate across teams to produce and publish accurate valuation reports
This process was time-consuming, error-prone, and dependent on institutional knowledge rather than system design. The absence of a unified interface meant that critical financial workflows relied heavily on manual effort and workarounds.
The challenge was not simply to “design a UI,” but to translate a complex, multi-department financial workflow into a single, coherent digital system that could reduce friction, improve accuracy, and support executive decision-making.
Early Feedback
Research
understanding people and systems
Before designing anything, I worked closely with business analysts and conducted in-depth workflow research with Senior Portfolio Managers and their teams.
This included:
• Studying how economic data moved across departments through limited platforms
• Mapping existing mental models and operational dependencies
• Identifying where manual steps, duplication, and delays occurred
• Understanding how the outputs of this process informed executive reporting
Studying how valuation data moved across departmentsMapping existing mental models and operational dependenciesIdentifying where manual steps, duplication, and delays occurredUnderstanding how the outputs of this process informed executive reporting
This research phase was critical.
The problem was not interface clarity — it was systems fragmentation.
