Designed digital banking onboarding, KYC, and payment authorization experiences for enterprise customers — turning a regulator-mandated friction zone into a completion-rate engine for new business banking accounts.
The Stakes
Outcomes — six-month product cycle
Maxtra Technologies built digital banking experiences for enterprise customers across India — onboarding, payments, beneficiary setup, account servicing. The product worked. What it couldn't do was get new business customers through KYC. Completion was stuck at 35% — meaning two out of every three SMEs who started signup walked away before becoming customers.
I owned the redesign of KYC and account onboarding journeys across a six-month product cycle, in close partnership with the compliance, product, and engineering teams. The brief on day one was deceptively simple: improve KYC completion without compromising regulatory posture. In RBI-regulated digital banking, those two goals usually pull in opposite directions. The work was figuring out the geometry where they didn't.
Headquarters
Noida, India
Industry
Fintech · Digital Banking SaaS
Customer Type
Enterprise B2B (banks & NBFCs)
End Users
SME owners, 30–55
Regulator
Reserve Bank of India (RBI)
Signup Volume
~5,000 new SME accounts/month
The completion data told a sharp story. 41% of all KYC drop-off happened at step 4 — "business proof" — where the system asked for a PAN card that the user had already uploaded in step 2. The form architecture had been designed by compliance with a "ask once per category" rationale, but UX-side it read as "this thing doesn't trust me, why am I doing this?" Most SME owners closed the tab.
"I uploaded my PAN. Then it asked for my PAN again. I gave up. I'll just go to my regular bank's branch on Saturday."
— Play Store review, 1-star, March 2022 cohortThe research strategy had to work around a hard constraint: we couldn't recruit SME owners during their live onboarding (compliance + privacy). So I built a four-source evidence stack from public reviews, internal analytics, competitor audits, and — the most consequential interview of the project — a conversation with the compliance team about which steps were actually regulatory.
The unlock came from a 90-minute conversation with the regulatory affairs team. The framing question was: "Of the 7 steps in current KYC, how many are RBI-mandated, and how many are internal policy?" The answer reshaped the entire redesign: only 4 of the 7 steps were RBI-mandated. The other 3 had been added "to be safe" during a prior compliance review. That meant the redesign wasn't a regulatory negotiation — it was an internal-policy negotiation, with much lower risk.
This is the kind of insight you only get from talking to compliance directly, with specific questions. "Is this regulatory?" is too binary. "Walk me through the rationale for each step" is where the wiggle room becomes visible.
Conditional disclosure was not the cleanest engineering solution. The data model became more complex (branching flows + dependency rules), and every branch needed compliance validation. The "pure" approach — deleting 3 steps from the data model entirely — was cleaner. But cleaner would have shipped in February. Conditional disclosure shipped in November.
At 5,000 new SME signups/month, a 23-point completion lift = 1,150 additional onboarded businesses/month. At an average lifetime fee revenue of ₹75K per SME account (publicly cited Indian business banking benchmark for the 2021–2022 cycle), that's ~₹8.6 Cr/month in newly-activated business banking revenue — or, more precisely, ~₹8.6 Cr in LTV that wouldn't have existed without the redesign. The math is rough, but the order of magnitude was defensible to the executive team and made the engineering complexity tradeoff trivial to justify.
In the old flow, business entity type (sole prop / LLP / partnership) was collected at step 5 — after all the personal documents were already uploaded. That meant we couldn't conditionally branch until users had done most of the work. By moving entity-type to step 1 (a single tap), we could route SMEs into the 4-step path immediately. This single re-sequencing decision unlocked the entire conditional disclosure approach.
Step counter shows total steps remaining, not steps completed.
User testing showed "Step 4 of 7" felt heavier than "3 steps left." Behavioural framing matters in compliance flows where every step feels like an obstacle. Reframing progress as remaining-steps reduced abandonment at step 2 by an estimated 8 percentage points in early pilots.
Inline rationale for every document request.
Each upload screen now answers the unspoken question: "why are you asking?" One-line plain-language rationale ("This helps RBI verify your business identity") moved the trust dial without changing what was being asked. The compliance team approved every line.
Outside the onboarding redesign, I redesigned the payment authorization workflow for business users. The old flow surfaced authorization codes via SMS only, with no in-product confirmation. Business users (multi-signatory accounts) frequently lost the SMS, leading to support escalations for "stuck transactions." The redesign added an in-product authorization queue with explicit signatory states, escalation timers, and a fallback "resend via voice call" path for accounts where SMS failed. Support escalations for failed payments dropped substantially in the post-launch quarter.
The KYC redesign produced reusable patterns — document upload states, multi-signatory flows, compliance progress indicators — that became the foundation for adjacent product modules. I documented these in a shared Figma library with cross-platform parity (mobile + web) and engineering-mapped tokens. The library cut design handoff ambiguity on adjacent banking workflows for the rest of my time at Maxtra.
KYC completion rate: 35% → ~58% within 6 months of full rollout. Methodology: pre/post comparison of 90-day funnel windows, with a 3-month bridging period to control for seasonality (SME signups spike in Q1 due to fiscal year setup). The lift was concentrated in the SME segment (the cohort that saw the 4-step path); complex entities saw a smaller 4-point lift, primarily from the inline rationale and progress redesign.
Onboarding time-to-complete (SME segment): ~23 min → ~11 min. Measured via session analytics for users who completed end-to-end. The time saving compounds with the completion lift — faster flows are more likely to be completed in a single session, reducing the 14-day completion window risk.
KYC-related support escalations dropped an estimated 40% based on category-tagged ticket analysis across the post-launch quarter. Methodology: ticketing system auto-categorization calibrated against a manual audit of 150 tickets, then pre/post compared.
Additional onboarded SMEs/month = 5,000 signups × 0.23 lift = ~1,150
Newly-activated LTV/month = 1,150 × ₹75K avg = ~₹8.6 Cr
Source for ₹75K avg lifetime fee revenue per SME account: cross-referenced from public Indian business banking benchmarks (KPMG India fintech 2021, EY India digital banking report 2022). The dollar figure isn't precision — it's an order-of-magnitude framing. The point isn't that the redesign generated ₹8.6 Cr; it's that the redesign converted an abandoned-funnel problem into a P&L-relevant outcome the executive team could defend.
"The KYC redesign was the first piece of UX work at the company that the CFO could quote in an investor call. That's when product design stopped being a cost center."
— Product Manager, internal post-launch debriefThe 58% completion rate is strong relative to the 35% baseline, but still ~7 points below the industry benchmark ceiling. The residual gap is now almost entirely in steps 2 and 3 (personal + business identity upload) where users still have to type business addresses, GST numbers, and entity registration details by hand.
Hypothesis: a deep PAN + GST API integration that pre-fills business identity from a single PAN entry would compress steps 2 and 3 from ~4 minutes of typing to ~20 seconds of validation. Estimated impact: completion lift of another 12–15 percentage points, pushing the SME funnel into 70%+ territory — industry-leading. Status: paused at Maxtra V2 due to API SDK contract delays, queued with full instrumentation already in place.
RBI-regulated digital banking is the design environment where every "good idea" has to clear three review boards before it ships. Compliance, legal, and engineering each had veto power. The constraint wasn't creative; it was procedural. The work was finding the design move that didn't trigger any of the three vetoes — while still delivering the impact the business case required.
A KYC flow that ships incomplete is worse than a slow one — an incomplete compliance flow risks regulatory exposure and customer trust simultaneously. So quality on the regulatory critical path was held flat. The lever was scope (conditional disclosure instead of deletion) and the lever was time (ship in 6 weeks instead of waiting 16 for the cleaner solution). That sequencing decision unlocked the entire impact.
"In regulated fintech, the design constraint isn't users. It's the review process. Design the process first — the product becomes easier from there."
Conclusion
In regulated fintech, design works at the seam between the regulator, the engineering team, and the abandoned customer. That seam is where the leverage lives.
The conditional disclosure pattern, in-product authorization queue, and compliance pair-review process remain in use across Maxtra's digital banking SaaS — and shaped how I approach every regulated-industry surface I've designed since.
Glad we could cross paths.
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