Brass banking

2022

Brass Commerce Studio

skills

Product Strategy / Art Direction / Interaction Design / Product Design

my role

I led product and design at Brass in 2022, my primary focus was on building new products for the Brass brand around Commerce. I collaborated with Product (Tolu Saba, Princess Akari), Engineering and the founder (Sola) who was my Manager.

Brass is a digital bank for SMEs in Nigeria that acts as a growth engine for African local businesses and consumers by providing them access to the financial tools they need to run their everyday business. In 2022 we discovered an opportunity to onboard more SMEs who could not yet complete the extensive KYC process and register their business with Bras.

I collaborated with the Head of Design as well as the CEO of Brass to scope / identify a balanced list of features and constraints that kept the problem interesting yet relatively easy to approach. They include

Users should be able to create a brass account without kyc

Users without a KYC should be able to use brass Invoices and collection products.

Users without KYC should be able to send funds using mono

Allow users to link their own bank accounts to receive payments for invoices for a fee.

Flows, risk and documentation

The Brass KYC / onboarding process from start to finish takes around 10 Minutes! While lengthy by most standards, the onboarding team has to with constraints such as Legal obligations, Risk management and standardised KYC requirements. My first step while working on this project was to understand and document the opportunity as well all the compliance/regulatory risk associated with creating a "shortcut" for KYC.

I collaborated with the CEO and Head of design to polish and iterate on the user flow from onboarding to the end of the funnel's life-cycle which we expected would lead to an improvement in customer onboarding, MAU and TAM.

Authentication with google

We decided to keep it very simple without leaving the gates wide open. To do this we introduced some friction to slow a user down. This friction was requiring a business email account when signing up with Gmail. This would weed out businesses that did not have a Google account. More on this later.

HANDOFF

I created a very detailed handoff / spec documentation sheet used by the engineering team to bring the UI to life.

Impact

Key results from experimenting with this product.

"48%of paying users had a try to the widget since its release1k+installations directly from Figma Community"

What did i learn?

This was one of the more challenging features to design for Brass Commerce, managing communication across multiple departments over several weeks was challenging and I had to create new systems to document feedback/decisions. Achieving alignment between the business goals and user needs posed a significant challenge for this project.

It was not without difficulty that we convinced stakeholders of the decisions made, but with persistent effort and transparent communication, we were able to effectively communicate and align our business objectives with the user's needs.

credits

Thanks to this incredible team we exceeded expectations, S/O to them:

Product Management

Kemdirim Akujuobi

Princess Akari

Engineering / QA

Damilola

Princess Akari

Product Design

Kemdirim Akujuobi

Product Management

Kemdirim Akujuobi

Princess Akari

Maintained by Kemdirim

© 2024

London, UK

10:47 AM