Flutterwave - Increasing our sign-up completion rate during a pandemic

Flutterwave is one of the payment processing companies that has revolutionized the online payment industry across Africa since its inception in 2016. In February 2020, just before the pandemic triggered a global lockdown, we anticipated increased online payments and e-commerce transactions. This led us to start exploring how to support our customers during this period better, beginning with smoother onboarding and merchant activation.

Project Background 

Project Background During the duration of this project, the world was going through a pandemic with so much uncertainty on what the future held. While this was going on, the company was expanding fast to sustain the business and grow our numbers, primarily in East Africa, and integrating many other payment solutions.

On a business aspect, this meant increasing the sign-up completion rate to get merchants activated faster. All without compromising global anti-money laundering (AML) policies in the countries we were expanding into by localizing our processes.

Problem Statement

The current onboarding process was becoming a bottleneck for many new customers and a significant drop-off point.

Design Opportunities

Connect the entire compliance and identity verification process experience into one seamless, integrated process for customers in a way that increases the overall conversion rate.

My Role and Collaboration

I worked on this project with an entire product team which included: Engineers, Product Manager, Quality Assurance, The Expansion team, and the Customer Experience team.

While working on this project, I took on various roles from time to time depending on the timeline, such as Research, Product Design, and a bit of Quality Assurance as the engineers started with implementation.

I also collaborated with members of the Expansion team who offered local insights, document types to request from customers, and the regulatory policies within the different countries.

Research Explorations

Early research started with me syncing with our Customer Experience team to note all of the complaints made by merchants about their experiences during the onboarding and compliance processes.

Next up was an audition of the existing flow. Auditing allowed me to experience how onboarding differs from country to country on the platform. Take note of probable drop-off points, discover edge cases encountered by users, and also allowed me to evaluate the internal process for reviewing compliance requests.

I also conducted user interviews with some existing users to understand their experience while signing up on Flutterwave. These helped validate the product needs and user pain points.

A Review of the Old Design

Based on the research conducted and patterns discovered, insights showed some common issues experienced by the majority of the participants, and these include the following:

01 - The "You are live" tag: Users found this tag confusing, as they were still in Test Mode and yet to complete their compliance on the platform.

02 - Users can toggle off Test Mode: Users being able to toggle off Test Mode meant that new customers can bypass some part of the onboarding process.

03 - Exhaustive List of Compliance Information: The presentation of the onboarding forms discouraged users from attempting to complete the information as it was overwhelming.

04 - Generic Error Messages: Whenever users encountered an error, the messages were usually incomprehensible as it was not customized to their country.

Design Approach

Flutterwave's category of users includes Individuals, Small businesses, and Large Enterprises that operate on different levels whose compliance requirements I needed to represent in the onboarding process. These different user categories are represented on the product as account types:

1. Individual accounts - for individuals looking to make and receive payments using Flutterwave example includes small-scale Instagram merchants.

2. Business accounts - this is for corporate entities with business registration documents and management boards.

I then created distinctive onboarding processes for the two account types before customizing them for the different countries. I did this to ensure we captured the necessary compliance requirements for each country's regulatory bodies.

My Solution

Taking all of the research findings and insights into consideration, I proceeded to design a solution that included the following:

• Unique localized onboarding and compliance processes designed for each of the countries we operated in.

• A generic onboarding process for the rest of the countries we have not officially launched in.

• I categorized the entire onboarding process into sections to avoid information overload and enable users to save their progress.

• Well-written and clear error messages for specific issues localized for each of the countries to ease comprehension.

• I adopted a mobile-friendly approach with responsive pages considering average mobile screen sizes, mobile viewports, and varying network speed.

Some Critical Parts of my Solution

01 - Error Message Localization: I identified the errors that users encounter in each country and including ways to resolve them without reaching out to customer support.

02 - Progress Counter: I introduced a progress counter for each section to encourage users to complete the section knowing that there is not much left.

03 - Independent Sections: I categorized the onboarding process into independent sections to enable users to save their progress.

04 - Switch to Live Mode: I updated the behavior of this button by disabling it such that it only becomes active after the customer has completed their onboarding.

Results 🎉

In the first six weeks of the release of this feature, we observed the following stats on MixPanel, our dashboard insights tool.

Lessons Learned

Some of the lessons I learned while working on this project include:

• When it comes to onboarding, there is no timeless solution for onboarding customers as the process needs to evolve just as much as the business is growing.

• The sooner one updates the non-technical stakeholders involved in the project, the faster one gets their buy-in.

• Involving the engineers at the beginning helped us figure out edge cases like handling of uploaded compliance files.

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