Sure Assist: A one stop shop for financial assistance

By Anna Popova, Susie Chang & Emily Yuan

Executive Summary

The COVID-19 crisis has emphasized the desperately needed change in our current processes for governmental financial assistance. To better understand the system and how the opinions and experiences of different stakeholders interact within the system, we conducted numerous empathy interviews. The individuals we spoke with fell into three main categories – small business owners, contract workers, and bankers.

The Problem

A universal thread throughout the interviews was confusion about which financial assistance programs individuals were eligible for, and frustrations surrounding the application process. Across all programs (Unemployment Insurance, the Payment Protection Program, and the SBA disaster loan) participants reported processes taking many hours, plagued by requests for

repetitive information that felt like “they were making it painful on purpose”, crashing websites, and little to no communication on if their application was received or its status. This led us to consider how we might redesign the financial assistance experience to be efficient, equitable, and compassionate.

Our Solution

We considered solutions with emphases ranging from facilitating relationships that nurture financial education, to data transparency on approval rates by demographics to bring attention to inequities.

Our final proposed solution is Sure Assist* – a simple service that helps

How it Works

individuals throughout the entire financial assistance process in three main ways:

  • Identifies and recommends assistance programs based on their specific eligibility and needs; instead of people having to wade through conflicting and constantly-changing information

Sure Assist then goes beyond ease and accuracy for individuals and small business owners. With informed consent, Sure Assist analyzes and publicizes approval rate data, allowing users to select filters that show patterns by business and individual demographics, such as annual revenue, number of employees, age, sex, location, and/or race. For example, users can search for “minority-owned small businesses with less than $500k in annual revenue in Los Angeles County” and see assistance approval rates in a clear graph. This data visualization is important to:

  • Inform individuals on their application in a wider context, and provide them with information on which banks are most receptive to lending to them

  • Highlight banks that have more equal lending rates and shine a light on the banks that engage in potentially discriminatory lending practices

  • Provide government regulatory agencies with information that helps them identify bright spots and problem areas, in order to create and enforce more equal lending standards

While designing our solution, we identified incentives for individuals, banks, and the state government, which would facilitate the eventual adoption of the proposal.

  • Prepares applications to selected programs, making the process as easy as a few clicks

  • Tracks the status of submitted applications and sends ongoing notifications based on applicants’ preferences (eg, by text, email, mail, or phone call)

On June 3rd, 2020 the Redesigning Finance students presented their work via Zoom to a panel of experts working in the finance sector.

  • Individual: The user centered design creates an intuitive platform that streamlines the financial assistance process, removing the headache that used to come with these applications. Customized program recommendations allow individuals and small businesses owners to receive the maximum amount of assistance for which they are eligible from the government.

  • Banks: Banks will save staff resources by receiving easier to process application data, and will funnel a pipeline of new business with clients linked to them through the PPP program.

  • State government: Applications based on existing tax documents will reduce fraud, greater transparency of funds will improve the state’s ability to keep federal programs and banks accountable and equitable, and higher approval rates for struggling individuals and small businesses in-state will reduce demands on the state budget.

Ultimately, Sure Assist aims to leverage existing financial information to create a quick, easy, and eventually fair experience for all financial assistance applicants. We hope this will be one step towards a more transparent and egalitarian financial system.

STUDENT TEAM