The onboarding feature went live in July 2021. Since then it has recorded some amazing results. The feature was an intensive 8 weeks project with a lot of learnings. Some major takeaways from this project were:
Building from the ground up
As the founding product designer at Advancly, most of the work I did was building 0-1 products from concepts. I’ve gotten very comfortable embracing ambiguity, mapping out flows and building concepts quick for validations.
The value of internal stakeholders
The chances of getting churned business to hop on research calls were non-existent. Working with the internal teams like Sales, Credit Assessment, Business Operations, and Engineering to map out the current new prospect journey proved to be super insightful and immensely valuable.
Customisable questions
The requirements the Credit Assessment team used to grade businesses could change over time, so it was important we weren't hard-coding questions. Admins are able to adjust the questions and weight them from Onboarding settings.
Customisable documents
Just like with the questions, Admins are able to specify the kind of documents and document type they want businesses to upload.
Kola Ojo.
Simplifying business onboarding for prospects
Advancly
Fast-growing fintech company empowering businesses to become digital lenders.
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Headquarters
Delaware, US
Engagement period
Aug 2020 - July 2021
Role
Solo product designer
Collaborators
Adedoyin Abiola, Charles Opokwu, Kemi, Gbenga
Contributions
Product strategy, UX Research, Information architecture, UI design, Usability testing, Design system
Advancly is a fast-growing B2B2C platform helping businesses across Africa to scale by empowering them to extend credit to their employees and customer base. I joined the team as its founding product designer in August 2020, just a few months after it was founded, and worked as the solo designer till July 2021.
By December of 2020, we had already onboarded 6 major businesses, and extended over $1 million in credit to 10,000 beneficiaries within Nigeria.
Highlighted Challenge
Because we were providing credit to beneficiaries through businesses, it was important we did extensive KYC on every business we decided to onboard. The problem was that currently, the Credit Assessment team was doing this process manually ⎯ talking to prospects for months over emails, and evaluating them on separate Excel spreadsheets.
Data collection was a mess, onboarding spanned across months, and many prospects were churning.
To solve this, we decided to build a self-onboarding feature.
The first step was working with senior product manager, Adedoyin Abiola, to get the Sales, Business Operation, Credit Assessment, and Engineering teams together to collaboratively map out what our current process looked like.
The workshop gave 3 major insights:
The major questions we had designing the onboarding feature were:
Business onboarding was a 2-step process. In the first step, prospective businesses need to fill out forms, take an eligibility test, and upload documents. After which engagement documents would then be extended to them.
How do we design an experience that reciprocates the trust we're asking of our prospects?
A major reason business prospects were churning was because they had no access to the platform during the 2 months we were running their KYC and finalising on agreements.
How do we simplify the evaluation process for our Credit Assessment team?
The Credit Assessment team had developed a grading system they were using to evaluate all prospective businesses. This system was a major factor in whether a business would be onboarded or not.
Getting on the same page
After the team was aligned on what needed to be done, I built out the detailed end-to-end onboarding flow. Working with the engineering and product team, we then refined the flow into an experience that could be implemented in three 2-week sprints.
To accomplish the seamless experience we had mapped out, I had to design two mirroring modules: the onboarding module on the business platforms for new prospects, and the corresponding module on the Admin platform for our Credit Assessment team.
The Admin module needed to mirror the processes we had created for the business prospect.
Asides driving design direction on the core product, other projects I worked on with the Advancly team include:
Sign up and onboarding
Receiving and signing SLAs
Admin platform
Onboarding pipeline
Admins are able to see all newly registered businesses and how much progress they have made in the onboarding process. This doubled as a handy tool for the customer support team
Business view
Admins are able to see all the business information and documents in one place. Since eligibility questions are set and weighted, the system also automatically grades each prospect.
The Game plan
Result & Learnings
Other Advancly projects
2 wks
Average time it takes to onboard and vet a business now. Previously it took 2 months.
40+
New businesses onboarded & vetted across 6 different countries.
$60m+
Disbursed in accessible loans to over 50,000 beneficiaries in the last 18 months.
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Advancly Funder’s platform (now called Advest) ⎯ this has genereated over $22 million in investments.
Advancly Admin dashboard ⎯ helped the Admin team monitor loans across six countries and drive NPL down to 0.67%
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Business platform
All KYC needed to happen in-app now. This meant designing an onboarding module that could accommodate document uploads, graded questions, and much more.
Designing a sandbox environment would enable the new prospects to now be able to experience the product first-hand. It also meant that they could save, track, and invite other team members to contribute to their onboarding progress.
Book a free mentorship session with me on ADPList. Look forward to speaking!
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