Faster isn't always better: why we deliberately slowed down financial onboarding
Context
PagoFX is an international payments product backed by Banco Santander. I worked on the KYC and KYB onboarding experience for individuals and small businesses, mainly in the UK.
Objective
Increase completed registrations by simplifying the onboarding journey, reducing unnecessary steps, and making verification clearer and easier to complete.
Team
2 UX/UI Designers · 1 backend developer · 1 frontend developer
My role
I mapped the existing journeys, designed and prototyped new flows, ran usability testing with UK users, and worked with engineering through handoff and implementation.
Key impacts
Usability testing with 10+
UK-based SME owners and individual customers
Mapped and redesigned 2 onboarding flows, including KYC and KYB processes
Research revealed that faster verification could reduce trust, leading to a partial redesign focused on progressive disclosure
Working process
Research and ideation
We started by looking for opportunities to make the onboarding journey faster and easier to complete. I mapped the existing KYC and KYB flows for both individuals and SMEs, looking for unnecessary steps, duplicated information, and moments where users had to leave the flow to find documents or information.
One of the biggest opportunities was company verification. For UK businesses, we could use official government data to retrieve company information instead of asking users to enter it manually. This changed the basic interaction from asking users to provide information to retrieving information and asking them to confirm it.
I then explored how this approach could simplify the rest of the journey while keeping the experience understandable.
Improvements after research
Reducing unnecessary steps and duplicated information
Some information was not essential to completing the onboarding, but had been included as potentially useful for future marketing activities. Since collecting it added extra steps without helping users complete verification, we removed those fields and kept the onboarding focused on the information users actually needed to provide.
Prefilling company information retrieved from official sources
Together with the backend team, we identified opportunities to retrieve information before users were asked to provide it. For example, some company information was needed later in the onboarding flow, but we could already request it from the API while users were completing their personal details in the first step. By the time they reached the company information step, the relevant fields were already pre-filled and only needed to be reviewed and confirmed. This reduced repeated input and made the transition between personal and business information feel more seamless.
Organising information into smaller, more manageable stages
The progress indicator didn't provide enough context. It was small and only showed users how many steps remained in the overall onboarding process, without indicating how much was left within the current step. This made the onboarding feel longer and less predictable, especially when a single step contained several fields. We redesigned the indicator to make progress more visible, helping users understand where they were, how much they had already completed, and what was still ahead.
At this stage, the goal was to create a smoother path through onboarding without overwhelming users with too much information at once.
Prototyping and testing
I applied the insights into a new design and created an interactive Figma prototype to test with 5–6 UK SME owners and 3–4 individual users. Participants navigated the prototype using Maze while thinking aloud, allowing us to understand both what they did and why they did it. The results challenged one of our initial assumptions.
The company verification was technically much faster than what participants were used to. But rather than seeing that speed as a benefit, some SME owners became suspicious. They were accustomed to government systems taking time to retrieve and verify information. When PagoFX returned their company information almost instantly, the experience didn't match their expectations.
One participant captured the issue particularly well: “That was too quick. How do I know this is my information? Something must be missing.”
The problem wasn't the speed of the technology, it was the perception created by that speed.
Learnings and conclusions
This became the most important design challenge of the project: how do you make a technically fast process feel trustworthy?
Our first instinct had been to remove friction wherever possible, but research showed that this wasn't always the right approach. For that reason we introduced small moments of intentional friction:
Meaningful pacing: short loading and transition animations gave users time to understand that their information was being retrieved and checked.
Progressive disclosure: instead of presenting all the information at once, we revealed it progressively as users moved through the journey.
Clearer guidance: we refined the copy and instructions so users understood what was happening, what information was being requested, and what they needed to do next.
The final approach wasn't about making onboarding slower. It was about removing unnecessary effort while preserving the moments that helped users build confidence.
The key learning: not all friction is bad friction.
For financial products, a good onboarding experience isn't simply the one that asks the least from users or takes the least time, it is the one that makes the process feel clear, believable and trustworthy.
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