FinFlow — Redesigning business banking onboarding & dashboard
New business customers were abandoning account setup before completing verification, and existing customers couldn't answer "how much cash do I have right now" without exporting a spreadsheet.
Business problem
Account-opening abandonment during KYC verification was the single largest drop-off point in the acquisition funnel, directly limiting new account growth for the quarter.
User problem
Small business owners applying for an account had no visibility into how many steps remained or why documents were being requested, and the cash-flow dashboard buried the one number — available balance across accounts — that owners checked daily.
Existing pain points
- Verification steps appeared as a single unbroken form with no progress indication
- Document requirements were explained in a support article, not in the flow itself
- Dashboard prioritized transaction history over current balance
- No mobile-optimized layout; 38% of applicants started on a phone
Opportunity identified
Research showed the abandonment wasn't about the requirements themselves — owners were willing to provide documents — it was about uncertainty. Making the process legible was the lever.
Methods used
- 12 moderated interviews with recently onboarded and abandoned applicants
- Funnel analytics review with the data team across 90 days of sessions
- Competitive teardown of 5 business banking onboarding flows
- Stakeholder interviews with Compliance, Support, and Growth
Dana, Café Owner
Primary persona · first-time applicantGoals
- Open account before payroll deadline
- Understand what's required upfront
Frustrations
- Unclear why a document was rejected
- No sense of time remaining
Key findings
Affinity mapping across interview notes surfaced three recurring themes: opacity of process, distrust triggered by document requests without explanation, and a mismatch between mobile usage and desktop-only design.
Problem framing
Reframed from "reduce form length" to "make an unfamiliar, high-stakes process feel predictable" — legibility, not brevity, was the design target.
UX goals
- Show progress and remaining time at every step
- Explain the "why" behind every document request inline
- Bring the account balance to the top of the returning-user dashboard
- Ship a mobile-first flow, not a scaled-down desktop one
Information architecture
Restructured a single 40-field form into five clearly labeled stages with independent save state, aligned with how Compliance actually reviews submissions.
Low-fidelity concepts explored three navigation models before landing on a persistent side-stepper. Annotations below mark the decisions carried into mid-fidelity.
Mid-fidelity iteration
Round two moved save-state indicators from a modal to a persistent top bar after three of five usability participants missed the modal entirely. This was the single highest-impact wireframe revision in the project.
Visual system
Built on the same design tokens later formalized in the Atlas design system: a restrained teal/ink palette for trust-driven financial contexts, generous 8px spacing scale, and a numeric type style tuned for balance and currency legibility.
Responsive & accessibility
- Stepper collapses to a horizontal progress bar under 640px
- All KPI cards meet 4.5:1 contrast in both themes
- Full keyboard operability through the verification flow, tested with screen readers
Prototype
Built a clickable end-to-end Figma prototype covering all five onboarding stages plus the redesigned dashboard, used for two rounds of moderated usability testing.
Testing & iteration
- Round 1 (n=6): stepper comprehension tested well; save-state was missed by half of participants
- Round 2 (n=8): after moving save-state to a persistent bar, 8/8 participants correctly identified their progress
- Document-rejection messaging rewritten twice after participants misread "resubmit" as a full restart
Feedback that changed the design
What changed: A single opaque form became a five-stage guided flow with persistent progress, inline rationale for every request, and independent save state. The dashboard reordered its hierarchy to lead with available balance instead of transaction history.
Why: Research consistently pointed to uncertainty, not effort, as the abandonment driver — so the design strategy optimized for legibility and trust signals rather than reducing the number of fields.
Business impact: Supported the Growth team's quarterly account-opening target by addressing the largest single drop-off point in the funnel, and reduced Support's document-related ticket volume by resolving the underlying confusion at the source.
Figures reflect internal analytics comparison across the quarter before and after rollout, shared with permission for portfolio use.
Treating Compliance as a design partner rather than a late-stage reviewer meant the "why we ask" copy was accurate on the first pass and needed no legal rework.
The first save-state pattern (a modal) was a design assumption I hadn't tested early enough — a five-minute guerrilla test earlier would have caught it before full-fidelity design.
Extend the same legible-progress pattern to the loan-application flow, which shares the same underlying verification steps but hasn't been redesigned yet.