SMALL BUSINESS ONBOARDING
role
Product Designer
timeline
12 weeks
company
Finli
As the sole product designer, I led a company-wide effort to streamline the onboarding experience while maintaining robust fraud prevention.
The redesign drove notable increases in sign-ups and catalyzed partnership opportunities by boosting user adoption and enabling seamless integration of partner needs.
overview
Finli had recently deployed a comprehensive rewrite that included the addition of multiple new features. Despite this, prospective businesses were deterred from signing up as they faced a tedious, multi-stage onboarding process: account creation, a compliance survey for payment enablement, a mandatory subscription payment, and a manual review process.
At the same time, Finli began pursuing partnerships with financial institutions. The existing onboarding flow threatened both user adoption and the ability to accommodate additional compliance and integration requirements from partners.
the challenge
Streamline onboarding to maximize adoption without compromising compliance or fraud prevention, while ensuring the flow is scalable for future partners.
THE PROCESS
ux audit
I mapped out the entire user flow during onboarding to conduct a heuristic evaluation and identify points of friction.
I discovered that process required users to provide sensitive personal and financial information upfront as well as agree to pay a subscription fee before they could even access the platform. From our low conversion rates, it was clear that users were not willing to provide this information nor pay for it, which was creating a barrier to adoption and value realization.
understanding constraints
I worked with our compliance team to understand the current state of onboarding. I discovered the questions were required to fulfill various categories of compliance needs; some were used verify the authenticity of the business or its owner while others were used to enable payment functionality.
Additionally, the team confirmed that the upfront subscription fee—a major user pain point—was a hard requirement. It served as Finli's primary revenue stream (instead of transaction fees), and provided a safeguard to filter out low-quality leads. In other words, there was very little room to budge as far as far as what was being asked of users.
evaluate competitors
I referenced competitors to see how they balanced user experience and security. While they also demanded extensive and sensitive information of their users, most platforms split up their onboarding process into digestible steps that felt less intimidating.
define ux strategy
Armed with insights from the UX audit, conversations with the compliance team and competitor research, I saw the opportunity to split the existing onboarding process into sections of similar questions rather than one long sequence. The sections created a more manageable experience for the user, while still retaining and fulfilling all of the compliance questions needed.
design explorations
I created low-fidelity designs to explore different flows for the newly defined onboarding sections. My goal was to draw users into the platform quickly, allowing them to experience its value before being asked to provide more sensitive information. I then iterated with the compliance and engineering teams, refining the flows to balance the ideal user experience with operational requirements and technical constraints.
design decisions + tradeoffs
The redesigned experience is organized into three main segments. It starts with the sign up process, which is lightweight to drive user activation and concludes with a subscription agreement. This creates a new account that grants the user with access to the Finli platform. Once onboard, users are encouraged to explore and test features, while subtle reminders throughout the platform prompt them to fill out a compliance questionnaire to enable digital payment processing at their convenience.
streamlining for activation
Sign up only included fields essential for backend user creation to boost activation, which we recognized as a key success metric for partnerships. This also lowered the barrier to entry so that users could access the platform immediately and experience its value before deciding to provide additional sensitive personal and financial information.
subscription agreement
In my initial design explorations, I sought to maximize transparency around the subscription agreement by placing it at the very start of the sign up process. Due to technical requirements, however, it was moved to be the final step of sign up as it triggered the back end creation of a user and prevented a number of edge cases relating to business fields.
SYSTEM visibility
The compliance form was designed to empower users with clarity and control. A “save and close” option allowed them to provide sensitive information at their own pace, while progress indicators gave visibility into completion, making the process feel less intimidating and more manageable.
operational coordination
Segmenting the flow meant designing around when operational systems granted or withheld access. For example, while a business could begin using the platform and initiate payments immediately after signing up, any funds received were held until compliance verification advanced the business's status in the admin panel. By surfacing this status internally and aligning the experience with operational guardrails, we gave users momentum without exposing Finli to risk.
impact
The redesigned onboarding experience drove a ~66% increase in merchant onboarding and a ~54% increase in conversion rates. Additionally, the experience has been central in securing three partnerships by seamlessly integrating compliance questions and custom subscription fees.