MCA Risk
Dashboard.

A tool people tolerated.

MCA — the Manager's Control Assessment — is how Citi tracks operational risk across every business line. The legacy tool was a sprawling form-and-table interface built over a decade, used reluctantly by analysts who kept their real notes in spreadsheets on the side. The dashboard wasn't broken. It just wasn't trusted.

The goal: rebuild the analyst experience from scratch — without breaking compliance, without losing data, and without forcing 300 people to re-learn their day job overnight.

Shadowing analysts on a real Tuesday.

I spent four weeks sitting next to analysts in three regions — New York, London, and Manila — watching them do their actual jobs. The pattern was painful: the tool asked them to think like a database when their work was actually narrative, comparative, and full of judgment.

Three insights drove the redesign: analysts needed context across assessments, not just one at a time; they needed to see their own progress at a glance; and they needed the tool to get out of the way when they knew what they were doing.

From forms to flow.

We rebuilt the home around a personal work queue — your open assessments, your deadlines, your flags — and pushed the bureaucratic structure (entity hierarchies, regulatory codes) into the background where it belonged. Inline editing replaced modal-heavy save flows. Comparisons across periods became a first-class feature instead of an export.

Faster work, happier analysts.

We rolled out region by region with intensive on-site training and a feedback channel that any analyst could ping. Within four months of full rollout, the metrics had moved — and the spreadsheets started disappearing.

Internal tools deserve consumer-grade design.

The hardest part of this project wasn't drawing screens — it was making the case that risk analysts deserved the same care a consumer banking customer would get. The tools that move the most money in the world are often the ugliest, and that's a choice, not a constraint.

The win wasn't the dashboard. It was a quiet shift in how the org thinks about its internal users — and a precedent that every internal tool that came after had to live up to.