Case Study - Rebuilding the collections workstation for a $1.1B auto-finance portfolio
Front-end engineering on an internal case management application to replace a fragmented six-app workflow used by collections agents at an auto-finance servicing firm — built in close partnership with the UX research and design team.
- Client
- Prestige Financial
- Year
- Service
- Front-end engineering, component library, design system implementation
The business problem
Prestige operated an auto-finance debt collection book with 43,000+ accounts under management, totaling $1.1B in serviced balances. Planned growth would push that account count from roughly 100 to 500+ per agent — and the existing tooling was already breaking under the current load.
Agents juggled six or more applications to do their job: Phoenix as the system of record, plus MuTrak, Invotra, TalkDesk, Word, and Power BI for messaging, payments, documents, and reporting. Every customer interaction required hunting across siloed systems for the right context. The cognitive load showed up directly in turnover — in 2022 alone, 50 new agents were hired and only 3 remained by year-end.
The mandate was a unified internal case management application: one workstation that consolidated outbound calls (ICT), inbound responses (INT), messaging, payments, documents, and account management into a learnable system that could scale headcount without scaling chaos.
My role
I was the front-end engineer on the rebuild, working in close partnership with the UX research and design team led by Stephanie Jae — who did the contextual inquiry, journey mapping, and design system work that the engineering side then had to make real. My focus areas:
- Building a reusable Blazor component library adopted across multiple internal products — reducing development time and enforcing accessibility standards organization-wide.
- Translating Stephanie's interactive prototypes into production-quality, responsive interfaces that matched the design specs precisely.
- Leading QA reviews and design workshops with the UX team before deployment, catching specification drift before it shipped.
- Integrating CI/CD pipelines and running cross-browser validation to maintain rendering consistency under the diverse browser footprint of an enterprise collections floor.
- Blazor (front-end)
- C# / .NET
- SASS / Bootstrap
- Reusable component library
- Design system implementation
- Azure DevOps / CI/CD
- Cross-browser QA
- Accessibility standards
Xavier Bradley is insightful, eager to learn, and proactive. As his team leader, I mentored him and observed his quick grasp of new concepts and holistic understanding of system functions. Xavier values soft skills and effectively adapts to new technologies, producing professional-quality web interfaces that meet design specifications. He excels in both styling and functionality, creating user interfaces that perform to requirements. Xavier communicates clearly, handles challenges well, and aligns with company culture. He will be a valuable asset to any UI team and future employer.
Outcomes during my tenure
- Productivity gain replacing legacy software
- 40%
- Page load time improvement
- 10x
- Lower infrastructure cost
- 15%
- Revenue potential unlocked
- $1.2M
A note on the ending
Prestige Financial closed its operations before the full product vision could ship. That outcome wasn't about the work — it was about the broader business. What I took from the engagement remains intact: experience shipping a component library adopted across multiple internal products, a working partnership with a UX team I respected, and a clearer sense of how front-end engineering decisions show up in operational metrics weeks later, not just in design reviews.