Overview
A major digital financial services company had no formal training program for its fraud operations teams. Investigators across six product verticals, lending, credit card, investments, banking, onshore, and offshore BPO, were learning through tribal knowledge, inconsistent shadowing, and ad hoc Slack messages. Compliance pass rates sat below 85%. Each product team wanted its own curriculum. There was one designer.
The Problem
Building six separate curricula wasn’t feasible, and even if it were, it would have created six fragmented programs with no shared foundation. Leadership needed compliance numbers up. The L&D team needed a scalable approach that didn’t collapse under the weight of six competing priorities.
My Approach
Instead of building 6 separate curricula, I designed a template-based curriculum architecture, a single modular framework with shared foundational modules and product-specific plug-in modules that could be swapped per audience.
Key Design Decisions
Reusable fraud detection heuristic, A 5-factor checklist that gave investigators a consistent mental model regardless of product line. Embedded as a recurring decision framework across all instructor-led sessions so the muscle memory built across contexts, not just within one.
Scenario-based labs using live production systems, Rather than sandboxed demos, investigators practiced on real (anonymized) case data. Transfer to the job was dramatically higher than any previous training approach.
Tiered audience model, Frontline intake → investigations → offshore BPO, with shared assessments scaled to role complexity. A frontline intake agent and a senior investigator needed different depth on the same decision, the architecture accommodated both.
30+ artifacts delivered, ILT decks, eLearning modules, facilitator guides, skills assessments, and hands-on system labs.
Outcomes
- 📈 Compliance pass rates improved by ~15 percentage points, from the mid-80s to the high-90s
- 😊 Post-training NPS increased by ~26%
- ⚡ Template approach reduced per-curriculum build time by ~60%, 1 build + 5 adaptations instead of 6 net-new builds
- 💰 Estimated ~$150K in design efficiency savings through templatization
- 🏆 Program recognized by operations leadership as foundational to the department’s growth
What This Shows
The ability to push back on “build us 6 things” and propose a smarter solution. Curriculum architecture and systems thinking at scale. Instructional design that prioritizes transfer (live-system labs) over comfort (sandboxed demos). Stakeholder management across multiple product teams with competing priorities and no shared vocabulary for what “training” even meant.
Artifacts available on request
- Curriculum architecture diagram (anonymized)
- Before/after learning path by audience tier
- Fraud detection heuristic framework (visual)
- Sample scenario lab walkthrough (redacted)
- Metrics summary card