Hyundai
Finance.
May 2025 – Jul 2025
Enabling car dealers to do soft credit checks, so they could see indicative affordability early in the showroom conversation.
I led the design and delivery of a Soft Search MVP, combining dealer-led discovery with a more measurable approach to product improvement.
Impact
One platform. Three brands.
eApply is HCUK’s strategic platform for managing dealer leads and progressing vehicle finance applications across Genesis, Hyundai and Kia.
Parent organisation
HCUK
Shared platform
eApply
Dealer leads and vehicle finance applications
Customer-facing brands
- Genesis Finance
- Hyundai Finance
- Kia Finance
Dealer teams
Manage leads and progress applications
Shipping features wasn’t enough.
eApply had been evolving for years, with new features being shipped to support dealers managing finance applications. But HCUK was under pressure to demonstrate the value of its investment in the platform, including the engineering effort and consultancy spend behind it.
I identified a gap: the team needed a clearer way to connect product development to measurable business outcomes and understand where the dealer experience could improve. Shipping features alone wasn’t enough to demonstrate impact.
01
Improve the experience
Reduce friction in the dealer-led finance journey, helping dealers progress applications and customers make more confident decisions.
02
Demonstrate business value
Connect product objectives to measurable business outcomes and user behaviour, creating a clearer basis for evaluating product performance and future investment.
Connecting product goals to measurable outcomes.
I facilitated cross-functional workshops with client, data and engineering stakeholders to connect business objectives to KPIs and UX-focused behavioural metrics.
The work helped establish a clearer framework for measuring product performance, with an analytics consultant subsequently brought in to develop the platform’s instrumentation.
A shift in the North Star
Initial proposal
Proposals accepted per month
Stakeholder discussion
Client, data and engineering
Prioritised metric
Finance penetration
Five business objectives
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01
Increase the number of customers who convert from a quote to a submitted proposal.
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02
Increase dealer usage of the eApply platform.
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03
Increase the used car acceptance rate.
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04
Increase usage of the inline EV tool.
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05
Increase usage of the standalone EV tool.
How the layers connect
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01
Business objectives
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02
KPIs
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03
UX-focused behavioural metrics
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04
Instrumentation
This framework connected business priorities to the product behaviours that could help explain performance. It illustrates the approach. Individual metric definitions are not reproduced here, and it does not show metrics that were already implemented or being tracked.
Turning business objectives into product decisions.
Soft Search was an opportunity to use the finance journey to address the business goals identified during discovery: improving customer conversion, increasing acceptance rates for used cars, and giving dealers greater clarity without discouraging customers from proceeding.
Business objectives
Stakeholder framing from discovery: what the Soft Search work needed to move, before we locked MVP scope.
01
Increase customer conversion
Move more customers from a quote to a submitted proposal.
02
Improve acceptance rates
Focus on acceptance rates for used cars in particular.
03
Provide dealers with clarity
Help dealers understand a customer’s indicative affordability without deterring them from proceeding with a proposal.
Pain points dealers kept repeating.
Themes from calls and workshops: the friction on the forecourt behind the business case.
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Showroom hesitation
Customers hesitant to apply for finance, resulting in missed sales opportunities.
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Negotiation dead-ends
Time wasted “haggling” with customers whose applications were later rejected.
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Broken hand-offs
Painful double-keying of customer information into multiple systems.
Finding the right place for soft credit searches.
Soft Search offered dealers an early read on indicative affordability, before a full application.
The challenge was deciding where in the customer journey to introduce it.
I worked with engineering and the Director of Innovation to work through the options.
Start with the dealer conversation.
A dealer-led MVP: ease hesitation earlier, keep the first release focused, and learn before a broader self-serve journey.
I mapped the path from the eApply dashboard to the results, then refined it with dealer feedback.
Mapping the happy flow.
Making the results easier to understand.
Dealer feedback showed that results could feel too harsh and important information could be missed. I refined the hierarchy, introduced more reassuring cues and added an explanatory step.
When dealers took the wheel
Swipe
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Results felt too harsh -
System feedback was unclear -
Important copy was missed
“We don’t want to embarrass the customer, particularly if we’re presenting this in the showroom. Showing someone a low score could make them walk out and be embarrassed.”
From harsh to gentle results.
Swipe
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A more reassuring result -
An explanatory step -
Clearer results and messaging
A consistent experience across three brands.
I worked with the wider team to deliver responsive Soft Search experiences across Genesis, Hyundai and Kia, including refined results and error states, and finance compliance sign-off.
I also established an initial lightweight design system using semantic tokens and reusable responsive components.
Initial design system
Swipe
A practical baseline for what we shipped, not a full design system.
A positive signal, with clearer measurement priorities.
The pilot went live across Genesis, Hyundai and Kia.
4%
Reported uplift in proposal acceptance.
A reported 4% uplift in proposal acceptance following the pilot.
Clearer measurement priorities
Business objectives, KPIs and UX-focused behavioural metrics were mapped, with subsequent instrumentation work to be developed by an analytics consultant.
