Workplace benefit enrollment redesign to increase auto-verification

Fidelity lost its automated loan verification partner due to legislative changes, disrupting the student debt benefit enrollment process. When uploaded documents failed verification, they were sent to a manual review team with a 5-day response time via chat.

As the market leader in student debt workplace benefits, Fidelity faced mounting pressure as enrollment rates dropped and operational costs threatened profitability. The business model — priced per enrolled participant — made every abandonment costly.

Participants treated enrollment like mailing paperwork: upload something, then wait days to learn if it worked. That model hid every mistake until it was too late to fix. I reframed it as a conversation: you show us your loan, we read it back to you instantly, and you fix anything that's off before you leave. Guidance, servicer selection, and PDF extraction all serve that one idea. We ruled out adding more instructions up front, because users skipped text they couldn't act on yet.

I aligned partners on three goals (raise auto-verification, lift completion, cut drop-off) and a phased plan that shipped value every few weeks: guidance first, then servicer selection, then the feedback loop.