Mercedes McGee - Product Designer

Entitlements & Deal Administration

T-REX is a SaaS-based solution designed to accelerate sustainable investment in complex markets across project finance, structured finance, and private credit. The existing entitlements framework required extensive customer support intervention from the admin site (TRA) and didn’t allow for distinct User roles per Deal or customization. Creating a self service entitlements system for clients to manage user and Deal level roles was needed to scale the platform and onboard new clients.

Role | Research, UX Strategy, UI
Partners | PM Lead, Dev

The goal of entitlements is to ensure that each user has the exact permissions they need to do their job. This means balancing security, efficiency, and ease of access. The entitlements had to be understandable for T-REX client services, who use our platform on a regular basis, as well as Deal Admins and a Deal Managers who are ultimately responsible for assuring the security of the Deal.

The PM Lead came with a proposed workflow and we started talking through and researching the problem. We needed to address permissions on three levels.

• Page permission - access to a page containing specific functions like modeling

• Operation permission - access to a specific action. Publishing a Deal or accessing the underlying model for example.

• Deal Library permissions - Deals can be public or private. Public deals have a default role assigned and are accessible by any registered user.

Primary Research

We conducted interviews with out 3-person customer success team and asked them what are the problems they face with the current entitlements system. They all said that options were too numerous and granular and descriptions weren’t understandable. Often, they found that they were copying permissions from one deal to another without a true understanding of the underlying functionality. Additionally the separation of Deal roles VS user roles in the navigation made it hard to understand and use.

Secondary Research

We also examined the functionality of entitlement systems already in use by our internal teams as well as looking at outside examples. Engaging in collaborative working sessions allowed us to to document essential features versus those that would be nice to have.

Through our primary and secondary research, and after talking through must haves our CTO, we started to sketch the features we needed to have and reviewed low fidelity wireframes with the team

User and Role Management

We decided to go with Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC), managing permissions per role, instead of explicitly listing all the available options to individual users. User Roles serve as a hub between users and permissions, so admins only need to assign roles to each user and configure which permissions the roles have.

We did several working sessions with Customer Success, the PM team and technology to take about 500 granular, user based capabilities to better defined group of 40, and assigned those to Roles solidify the permissions into logical groupings and make them less granular capabilities.

We set 5 default hierarchical roles, with each role inheriting the same permissions as those below it. For example, The Deal owner can assign other users rights to manage Deal participants and has all of the rights of the roles underneath it. Deal Managers have all of the same permissions as Report Analysts, plus additional capabilities.

Prototypes revealed users were having trouble discerning between roles. So we added the descriptions and a high level run down of the capabilities in the menu. Users also have access to the complete capabilities in the help center.

Once roles are assigned, the Admin can give users a heads-up and get them activated. This way, Deals can continue to be worked on while roles get sorted early, adding an extra layer of control and security measures along the way.

T-REX also allows for a unique public and private Deal library.

T-REX’s focus on structured finance, project finance, and asset-backed lending means that many of our Deals are only accessible to market participants with explicit entitlements. The Deal library is the mechanism that makes a deal progressively more open to the public and allows for the setting of a default roles for Public Deals.

Direct feedback on setting Deal Library access permissions revealed that clients didn’t understand the concept and it required additional exploration.

The Revised Entitlements Approach

In our older system roles and permissions had a separate access points, but were clearly interrelated. By having the same navigation for both Deal, User Roles & Permissions it makes it clearer to see what is happening on a Deal at a glance.

Additional benefits included:

• Reduced burden for customer success

• Simplified auditing

• Scalability

• Flexibility

• Higher levels of security.