How to create products that Financial Services apps will offer

How to create products that Financial Services apps will offer

Description	Creating a sample financial services product
Version as of	8.5
Application	Pega Foundation for Financial Services
Capability/Industry Area	Financial Services

This design pattern describes the process and thinking when creating sample products primarily using the Product Designer for FS (PDFS). The PDFS application is an example of how clients can use Pega’s low code case management to define and manage a product’s lifecycle. PDFS’s sample products have two purposes:

• Populating the PDFS sample application with a set of realistic products so that the dashboards, catalog, and library have decent data to show during a PDFS demo to a customer.
• Working as a common set of products that can be used by PDFS’s consuming applications: PMFS, SAFS, CLM.

Creating sample products by using PDFS

Below are the steps that should be followed when creating sample products:

1. Create a sample product structure.
2. Ensure that the Product Catalog ruleset is set to Demo.
3. Add any additional attributes that may be needed.
4. Create the required price rules.
5. Create the required eligibility rules.
6. Create the required benefit rules.
7. Create the appropriate template(s).
8. Create the products (accounts/services).
9. Create the bundles.

Sample Product Structure

The sample product structure should be set up for the market segment that you are creating products for. Below is a snapshot of a sample product structure that was set up in a PDFS application:

The market segments are Retail, Small Medium Business, Commercial, and Corporate & Investment Banking. Ensure that the taxonomy is created and the product structure is populated with appropriate values. Once the product structure has been created, then create the following:

• The appropriate workbaskets
• The Operator IDs, using the following naming standard: Operator id@ ‘market segment’.uplusfs.com

The operators that need to be created are:

• Desiree.Dixon@...  (Product Designer)
• Mark.Martinez@... (Product Marketer)
• Manny.May@... (Manager/Approver)
• Pam.Perkins@... (Power user – has all roles)
• Dev.Darsha@... (developer/sysadmin)

Product Catalog ruleset

The Product Catalog Ruleset Dynamic System Setting defines which ruleset the products should be written to. PDFS ships with this DSS setting set to PegaPDFSCatalog. This DSS setting can be set on the Financial Services > PDFS Configurations landing page. Make sure that this setting is set to PegaPDFSCatalogDemo.

Attributes

There are a set of attributes that ship with PDFS and can be used directly in the creation of products. Review this list of attributes to see if there are any new attributes needed to support the products you are creating.

Price

You should also create the price rules that are required by your products, and there are a set of price rules in the PDFS sample application that you can use as models. Follow these guidelines when creating price rules:

• Consider reusability - Make sure the price rule is high enough in the product structure, so it can be reused by other products. Don’t always put it at the top, but put it at the node in the structure that makes the most sense.
• The currency should be blank. This will indicate that the default currency specified in the organization operational structure will be used at run-time. 
• If you create a price rule that is a percentage of an attribute, make sure the attribute that you need has been created first.
• If the price rule will use a lookup table, build that first in Dev Studio and reference it here.

Eligibility

Determine the eligibility requirements for your product. There are many eligibility rules already in the PDFS sample application. The eligibility rules are not associated with the product structure, but are just a list of rules, so check to see if what you need has already been created and use that.

Benefits

Determine the benefits that are required for your product. There are many benefit rules already in the PDFS sample application. The benefit rules are not associated with the product structure, but are just a list of rules, so check to see if what you need has already been created and use that.

When creating benefits, we have been using sentence case to give a consistent look to the benefit list in the library. The elements of the benefit show up in different parts of the system, so choose the text you use accordingly:

• The Benefit Name – Used in the list of benefits when adding them to the template and product.
• The Benefit Description – Used by the consuming applications when they show a bulleted list of benefits.
• The Benefit Details – A more detailed description of what the benefit is and how it is used. Currently, this is not displayed on the screen in the consuming apps, but it could be in the future.

Templates

The template describes the details and characteristics of a product. The more thought that goes into the template, the easier the creation of the actual products will be. 

There are sets of attributes that are required for all products. These should be pulled into each template.

Attributes required for all products

Attribute	Lock – required	Lock – read only	Default value	Reason it is required
Benefit statement	Yes	No		Needed by PMFS, SAFS
Eligibility statement	Yes	No		Needed by PMFS, SAFS
How it works	Yes	No		Needed by PMFS, SAFS
Pricing statement	Yes	No		Needed by PMFS, SAFS
Marketing description	Yes	No		Needed by PMFS, SAFS
Party type 1	Yes	No	Individual, Organization or Fund	Needed by PMFS, SAFS
Party type 2	No	No	Individual, Organization or Fund	Needed by PMFS, SAFS
Party type 3	No	No	Individual, Organization or Fund	Needed by PMFS, SAFS
Product icon link	No	No		Needed by PMFS, SAFS
Counter party position	Yes	Yes	Value appropriate for product
Credit analysis required	Yes	Yes	Value appropriate for product
Legal documentation required	Yes	Yes	Value appropriate for product
Vulnerable	Yes	Yes	Value appropriate for product
Vulnerable reason	Yes	Yes	Value appropriate for product

Attributes required for most lending products

Attribute	Lock – required	Lock – read only	Default value	Reason it is required
Loan amount	Yes	No	None	Used by pricing, populated during onboarding
Principal amount	Yes	No	None	Used by pricing, populated during onboarding
Term	Yes	No	None	Used by pricing, populated during onboarding
Credit score			None	Used by pricing, populated during onboarding
Minimum loan amount			None	Populated during onboarding
Maximum loan amount			None	Populated during onboarding
Minimum down payment percentage			None	Populated during onboarding
Number of payments			None	Used by core banking systems
Number of transactions			None	Used by core banking systems

Attributes required for most deposit products

Attribute	Lock – required	Lock – read only	Default value	Reason it is required
Minimum opening deposit			None	Populated during onboarding
Number monthly wire transfers			None	Used by pricing, Used by core banking systems
Number of transactions			None	Used by pricing, Used by core banking systems
Transaction amount			None	Used by core banking systems

Additional guidelines when creating Templates

• Consider reusability - Make sure the template is high enough in the product structure so that it can be used to create the appropriate products. Don’t always put it at the top, but put it at the node in the structure that makes the most sense.

The snapshot below shows the levels of the nodes you could be deciding to select for the template/product creation:

• When adding attributes to the template, they show up in the work area of the template and product in the order they are listed. You can rearrange the attributes in the list by dragging and dropping them in the order that you want them to show up on the screen. We have been grouping the attributes logically, listing the ‘marketing attributes’ that have a paragraph text box first, followed by other product types of attributes, followed by the attributes needed for onboarding, and then finally the attributes needed by CLM at the bottom. You can arrange them in the order that makes sense for your product.

• When adding default values to the template, remember that they can be changed in the product, so if the text is very similar for the different products, you can add the most common ones to the template and then just tweak the text in the resulting products.

This is where certain attributes are displayed in the WSS screens for Onboarding:

Products

Products that are accounts are usually created in the lowest leaf node of the product structure. Products that are services can be higher in the product structure so that they can be reused when associating them with products. If most of the detail is populated in the template, creating the products is a very quick process.

Bundles

Once the products are created, they can be pulled into bundles.