Capital Risk Monitoring at Affirm (CRMS)

 

Goal

Designing a post-close dashboard to track funding thresholds, risk indicators, and originations across facilities.


The CRMS sits downstream in the deal flow — after loans have closed and been reported, Capital needs to actively monitor utilization and risk thresholds.

As Affirm scaled, Capital and Treasury needed a reliable way to track the health of their funding facilities. But risk monitoring was manual, scattered across spreadsheets, and difficult to audit. Teams couldn’t quickly answer:

  • Are we approaching a facility’s utilization limit?

  • Are originations aligned with forecast?

  • Are we nearing escalation thresholds?

To solve this, we introduced the Capital Risk Monitoring System (CRMS) — a dashboard that centralized risk indicators, originations, and thresholds into a single source of truth.

My role

I was a supporting Product Designer on CRMS, working with a Principal Designer, Product Manager, and Capital leads. I contributed to:

  • Visualizing risk and origination data

  • Designing filterable trend charts and segmentation tables

  • Wireframing metrics hierarchy and table states

  • Ensuring auditability and system clarity for future extensibility

Problem

Prior to CRMS, Affirm’s post-close monitoring process was:

  • Fragmented across static reports

  • Hard to audit or filter across segments

  • Lacking real-time insights into funding and utilization trends

Capital Markets needed better tools to:

  • Track capacity and utilization trends

  • Monitor originations vs. forecast

  • View loan concentration by segment or cohort

  • Export filtered views and act on early signals

We designed and shipped:

  • ✅ Funding Risk dashboard with capacity & utilization trends

  • ✅ Origination reports with filters and downloadable exports

  • ✅ Loan segment table with collapsed and expanded views

  • ✅ Threshold hover states and early warning visuals

  • ✅ Filter components across product, FICO, date, loan term

This turned scattered, ad-hoc tracking into a real-time decision support tool.

📐 Component Design

We paid special attention to reusable components across the experience:

Chart states, date ranges, hover views, and multi-select filters.

Collapsed and expanded states for understanding segment capacity.

These ensured CRMS could scale horizontally — supporting multiple facilities and views without duplicative designs.

💡 How It Helped

  • Provided a shared source of truth for Capital and Treasury

  • Simplified oversight of originations and funding utilization

  • Reduced backchannel confusion around limits and triggers

  • Enabled clearer conversations across finance, ops, and modeling

🔭 Looking Ahead

While the CRMS MVP focused on visualizing existing data, future phases could include:

  • Alerts for approaching thresholds

  • Scenario planning based on funding levels

  • Integration with CRMS triggers & model forecasting

  • Expanded audit logs and historical drillbacks

🧵 Final Reflection

“CRMS showed me how post-close monitoring is just as critical as deal execution. Designing a tool that made risk and capacity more visible helped bridge finance, ops, and modeling — and taught me how small UX touches can clarify massive financial systems.”