Designed end-to-end digital banking experiences across customer onboarding, payments, account servicing, and self-service applications — improving customer journey efficiency and overall usability.
The Stakes
Outcomes
Maxtra Technologies builds digital banking experiences — customer onboarding, payments, account servicing, and self-service applications. The product worked. What it couldn't do was get new customers through onboarding efficiently. Completion rates were low, drop-offs were high, and the overall customer journey created more friction than it resolved.
I owned the end-to-end redesign of digital banking experiences across customer onboarding, KYC workflows, payment authorization, and self-service applications, in close partnership with cross-functional teams throughout product discovery, design reviews, sprint ceremonies, and product releases.
Headquarters
Noida, India
Industry
Fintech · Digital Banking SaaS
Customer Type
Enterprise B2B (banks & NBFCs)
End Users
Business banking customers
Compliance
Regulated digital banking
Scope
Onboarding, Payments, Servicing
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.
The cleanest solution would have shipped in February. Conditional disclosure shipped in November. Ten weeks of shipped product beat sixteen weeks of engineering purity.
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.
Engineering complexity is recoverable through refactoring later. Customers walking out the door for four months are not.
At 5,000 new SME signups/month, a 33% completion lift = ~1,650 additional onboarded businesses/month. Combined with a 28% reduction in drop-offs and 22% fewer support requests, the redesign translated directly into measurable revenue recovery and operational savings. 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.
Onboarding completion increased by 33% through redesigned KYC and digital onboarding workflows. The improvement was driven by streamlined form flows, reduced redundancy, and clearer progress communication throughout the journey.
Customer drop-offs reduced by 28% across the onboarding journey. The reduction was concentrated in the identity verification and document upload stages — exactly the steps where the redesign eliminated the most friction.
Task completion rates improved by 30% through user research, competitive analysis, heuristic evaluations, and usability testing that identified and resolved key usability issues across the platform.
Designed seamless payment authorization, beneficiary management, bill payment, fund transfer, and transaction processing experiences, reducing customer support requests by 22% while improving transaction success rates.
Developed reusable design systems, responsive UI components, and interactive prototypes that accelerated engineering delivery while reducing design effort by 30%. Continuously optimized digital banking journeys using customer feedback, product analytics, usability insights, and A/B testing, increasing customer satisfaction by 27% while improving feature adoption.
"The onboarding redesign was the first piece of UX work at the company that the leadership could tie directly to business outcomes. That's when product design stopped being a cost center."
— Product Manager, internal post-launch debriefThe +33% onboarding completion lift is strong relative to the baseline, but still short of the industry benchmark ceiling. The residual gap is concentrated in the identity verification and business detail entry steps where users still have to type addresses, tax identifiers, and entity registration details by hand.
Hypothesis: a deep identity-verification API integration that pre-fills business details from a single identifier entry would compress the manual-entry steps from ~4 minutes of typing to ~20 seconds of validation. Estimated impact: completion lift of another 12–15 percentage points, pushing the onboarding funnel into 70%+ territory — industry-leading. Status: paused at Maxtra V2 due to API SDK contract delays, queued with full instrumentation already in place.
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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