Merchant onboarding transformation
Service design lead on transforming the merchant onboarding journey for a major payments and POS company. Mapped the existing process, built customer archetypes from primary research, defined a service blueprint that untangled an ad-hoc multi-team flow, and prototyped the future state through to user testing.
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A payments and POS company was losing merchants in onboarding. Not at the front of the funnel where most companies lose them. They were losing them after the application went in, somewhere inside a process so tangled that nobody on either side could explain it cleanly. Drop-out at the far end of the journey was the symptom. The question was where the disease lived.
My role
Service design lead. I joined to map the current state, run the research that would tell us what was actually happening, define the future-state service, and prototype a journey we could test before anyone wrote a line of code.
The problem
The first artefact I produced was a current-state journey map of the existing onboarding process, and it was more useful as a piece of evidence than as a deliverable. The map showed an ad-hoc multi-team process built up over years, with no source of truth for documents, no centralised repository, no single list of required materials, lack of ownership across hand-offs, and individual SLAs that incentivised people to pass applications off rather than push them forward. 27% of POS merchants in 2019 boarded but never activated. 48% of merchant accounts in 2020 never got there at all.
You can’t fix that with a smoother sign-up form. The work had to go upstream.
Customer research
We assembled a panel of six merchants plus sellers and partners and ran in-depth interviews during the first sprint. The patterns clustered into four archetypes: Daytimers, Self-starters, Analysts, and Pragmatists, each with different motivations, security expectations, and tolerance for friction. Joanne, a Self-starter, became the persona that anchored most of our future-state work because her segment carried the highest growth potential and the strongest expectation that onboarding should feel like a modern consumer product.
Findings went to client product managers, designers, and senior leadership. The point wasn’t to gather buy-in for a particular design direction. It was to make sure everyone on the project was looking at the same merchant when they made decisions.
Service blueprint
The service blueprint was the single most important artefact on this project. Mapping the future-state journey across stages (Apply, Approve, Activate, Transact), with customer mindset, customer experience, time, customer actions, above-the-line touchpoints, and backstage actions all rendered on a single canvas. Working with client experts to validate, then iterating based on feasibility of the main components. The blueprint untangled the process by making every team’s contribution visible to every other team at the same time.
It also let us identify the design library we’d need to build, ready to go before the build phase started.
Prototypes
The final artefact was the prototype itself, built in Sketch and InVision. White-labelled deliberately so user testing could be as neutral as possible: when the brand isn’t telling you what to feel, you find out what the experience is actually doing. Mobile and desktop journeys, designed in parallel because merchant onboarding splits across both. Multiple rounds of testing with the customer panel, particularly on the client due-diligence flows which were the most operationally complex.
Outcomes
The team came out of the engagement with a future-state journey, a service blueprint validated by both customers and internal experts, prototypes ready for development, and crucially, a shared understanding of where ownership had to live for the new process to work. The hardest output to deliver on a project like this isn’t the design. It’s the alignment that makes the design buildable.