[Placeholder] Identity verification for a fintech onboarding
Reframed KYC from a compliance hurdle into a progress moment — ID capture, liveness check, and address proof in one guided path.
Context
A challenger bank was onboarding strong at the top of the funnel but losing roughly half of qualified applicants at the KYC stage. The compliance flow sat inside a modal that felt grafted onto the product.
Problem
Members perceived identity verification as something being done to them rather than with them. Error states were generic (“Please try again”), uploads failed silently on slow connections, and no step communicated what success would look like.
My role
Design lead for the onboarding stream. I partnered with compliance to translate rules into plain-language patterns, and with engineering to spec a resumable upload model so a dropped network didn’t mean restarting.
Process
We ran six remote tests to pinpoint where the flow lost people’s trust. The biggest unlock was explicit staging: tell members all three steps upfront, celebrate each one, and treat retries as help rather than failure.
Key decisions
Replace the modal with a full-page guided flow that feels like part of the product. Preview each step before asking for it. On document errors, show the document and the specific issue — never just an error toast.
Outcome
KYC drop-off fell 41% within six weeks of launch. Support contacts for “stuck in verification” dropped by roughly two-thirds, and net applicant NPS at the KYC stage went from -12 to +31.