PAY-BY LINKS
role
Product Designer
timeline
9 weeks
company
Finli
I drove the end-to-end design of Pay-By Links, a convenient payment solution that reduces effort for small business owners and provides their customers with a flexible way to pay.
The feature opened up new revenue opportunities that traditional invoicing couldn’t easily capture and quickly gained adoption as a reliable payment channel in its own right. Its success also strengthened Finli’s positioning with financial institution partners by fostering a broader, more versatile suite of tools.
overview
While invoices had long been the cornerstone of Finli's platform, we noticed that competitors offered a wider variety of payment tools. In order to remain competitive and position ourselves as a comprehensive digital back office to prospective partners, Finli sought to expand our payment offerings.
The need became urgent after several high-volume businesses on our platform shared that creating invoices at scale was burdensome. Even businesses that invoiced frequently struggled with one-off sales, where generating an invoice created unnecessary overhead. These gaps made it clear that Finli needed a lighter, more flexible way for merchants to accept payments without relying solely on invoices.
the challenge
How might we reduce administrative effort for businesses while giving them faster + flexible ways to collect payments?
THE PROCESS
user research
We began the discovery process by further investigating how businesses were struggling with invoices. One business, in particular, had 2 employees that had to issue 280+ invoices on a regular basis which created a huge administrative burden and disrupted their cash flow. On the other hand, there were a number of businesses who neglected to invoice their customers whenever they sold them one-off items outside of their typical recurring bills, causing them to experience losses.
These insights made it clear that businesses needed a faster, more flexible way to accept payments that could complement invoicing.
evaluate competitors
Payment links were a standard offering among competitors. They offered a simple yet versatile solution that fulfilled a wide range of use cases, mirroring the same gaps we uncovered in our user research. Offering the payment link product would allow us to address the issues our existing businesses were facing with invoices while positioning us more favorably in the market in our pursuit of partnerships.
scope alignment
At first, the scope felt unmanageably broad, as the team imagined links being used in countless ways. We had internalized the belief that “revenue = invoices,” which compelled us to impart invoice-like functionality onto humble payment link. These ideas hampered its versatility and significantly increased technical complexity.
To move forward, we had to pare down our ideas to an MVP that directly addressed the central challenge. We reserved the additional ideas for potential future states, contingent on the adoption and emergent use cases.
uncovering complexity
We defined the MVP as a single business-specific link (called Pay-by Links or PBLs for short) for customer-initiated payments. While seemingly straightforward, the simplicity of the front-facing customer experience concealed significant complexity we needed to build for businesses within the actual platform.
For the link to be truly usable, businesses needed tools to configure and manage the PBL, share it with their customers, track payments not tied to invoices, and gather context to reduce ambiguity around where funds were coming from. On a higher level, a brand new feature meant that we had to reconsider product hierarchy among our suite of tools.
Design explorations
While wireframing, I first considered how to design the business's primary interactions with the Pay-by Link. This would include the first-time user experience, previewing and configuring the link, and distributing it to their customers. From there, I designed the customer's experience on the PBL and the business's experience tracking and managing the incoming PBL payments in tandem, as they informed one another directly.
design decisions + tradeoffs
The final Pay-By Link design delivers a comprehensive, end-to-end solution that spans multiple user perspectives.
portal experience
I drew inspiration from our long-standing Invoice Builder to establish the management page for Pay-by-Links, which I saw as its equivalent. This also served as a way to maintain design consistency across features.
Unlike invoices, which had a wide variety of toggles and fields to determine payment terms, the scope of Pay-by-Links was much leaner. To adapt, I created tiles that allowed businesses to quickly share their unique link, paired with a live preview on the right side. The builder-like structure also laid a foundation for future evolutions of the feature, where links could support more advanced configurations over time.
link configuration
Initially, I had planned for businesses to customize their Pay-by-Link subdomain (ex. business.finli.com/pay) directly on the management page. However, the engineering team flagged this as technically burdensome due to the need for ongoing management and resources.
I compromised by moving the customization option into the business's Account Settings. Despite not being ideal, it made sense for the MVP since each business had a single dedicated link. On the Pay-by-Link page itself, I designed the subdomain to appear fixed yet shareable, while including clear guidance and a direct link guiding the user to where it could be updated.
payer experience
Because Pay-By Links would be shared via text, email, or social channels, I made sure to optimize the page for mobile use. I also considered ways to make it appear actionable and intuitive, since the customer controls the payment.
The page leads with a text field prompting the user to enter a dollar amount, followed by the selection of a payment method. The final section provides the opportunity for the customer to contextualize the payment for the business and payment monitoring among Finli's payments team.
payment management
The addition of the Pay-by Link required a redesign of the Payments table, where businesses tracked and managed payments from their customers on Finli. The table was tailored solely to invoice-derived payments and cluttered with raw data that made it difficult to glean key insights.
I addressed both of these issues by restructuring the table columns to highlight the most critical data for businesses, and introduced a new "Source" column that distinguished payments coming from invoices versus Pay-by Links. I employed a drawer UI to keep the main view neat and streamlined while preserving access to supplemental, source-specific details that allowed users to dig into specific payments when needed.
product hierarchy
The introduction of Pay-by Links required us to re-evaluate the hierarchy of all features on the platform. At that point, we had ordered the features in a way that generally mirrored the process of creating an invoice on Finli (creating a customer, then your items, providing a quote, converting it into an invoice…). We decided this would become increasingly obsolete as we continued to expand our offerings, so we rearranged the menu to according to anticipated payment volume and use.
security & compliance considerations
The lowered friction of submitting payments made it easier to commit fraud. To balance ease of use with security, I implemented several safeguards within the design itself. I added a minimum payment amount to deter card testing, required payer contact information and message fields to make payments more traceable, and created a disabled state for any businesses that had not yet passed compliance. These measures allowed us to maintain a streamlined experience for legitimate users while reducing opportunities for fraudulent activity and ensuring adherence to compliance standards.
impact
Since its release, Pay-By Links has been widely adopted into the daily operations of Finli’s businesses, contributing to a 225% increase in total payment volume. While most businesses use invoices and Pay-By Links, a subset relies on Pay-By Links exclusively which demonstrates that the feature not only complements invoicing but also unlocked a new customer base for the platform.