Cutting KYB from 50 to 15 minutes at Qashio
A ground-up rethink of KYB and auto-onboarding for a fast-growing MENA corporate card platform. A rebuilt flow, an invoice engine adopted by 80% of active users in month one, and a design system that halved handoff friction.
- Client
- Qashio — Corporate spend & card platform
- Role
- Product Designer
- Year
- 2024 — 2026
- Tools
- Figma · PostHog · Cursor · Claude · JIRA
Method, insight, decision, tradeoff.
The four beats that turn a project into evidence — how I researched it, what I learned, the call I made, and the compromise I accepted to make the call.
6 weeks of interviews with finance + compliance, five moderated onboarding sessions, plus a PostHog funnel audit of every step in production.
Teams weren't stuck on the questions — they were stuck waiting on each other. Every dropout mapped to a handoff the flow assumed one person owned.
Split KYB into a parallel path: admins invite documents, delegate role assignment, and continue in the app while approvers sign in a separate channel. Progress moved from a step counter to a live team board.
A more complex mental model on day one (roles, delegation, statuses) in exchange for a flow finance teams could actually finish without CS help.
Phases, decisions, artifacts, outcomes.
The actual shape of the work — not the marketing version. Each phase lists the calls I made, what shipped, and what moved.
Discover
- Interview compliance + finance, not just admins.
- PostHog funnel audit over a fresh survey — the data was already there.
- 12 interviews, 5 moderated onboarding sessions.
- End-to-end funnel with drop-off attribution.
Named the real failure mode: teams waiting on each other, not on the form.
Define
- Parallel-path KYB, not a shorter linear one.
- Progress moves from step counter to a live team board.
- Reference flow + role-permission matrix.
- Auto-onboarding data spec, co-authored with backend.
Committed the team to a delegation model, not a form redesign.
Design
- Consolidate ~30 components into tokens before touching flows.
- Ship mobile and web in parallel from one source of truth.
- Redesigned KYB, invoice engine, receipt matcher.
- Token-backed component library + handoff doc.
Design-to-dev handoff on common screens: days → hours.
Ship & Measure
- Staged rollout by cohort, not a big-bang release.
- PostHog events wired into the QA plan, not bolted on after.
- QA test plan, release notes, live funnel dashboard.
KYB 50 → 15 min · Activation +22% · Invoice tool at 80% adoption in month one.
Context
Qashio sells trust. Finance teams hand over their spend to a platform that promises control, and every minute of friction in onboarding erodes that promise before it can be tested.
The existing KYB flow took 50 minutes on average, ran across four disconnected surfaces, and quietly dropped 4 out of 10 businesses before their first card was ever issued. Fixing it meant designing the operational reality of a compliance team as much as designing an interface.
Constraints on the table
- Regulatory checks that could not be shortened, only re-sequenced.
- A live customer base already halfway through the old flow.
- Multi-role permissions — admins, approvers, cardholders — sharing the same screens.
- A mobile app and a web dashboard that had drifted apart over two years.
Research
Six weeks of interviews with finance leads and compliance officers, five moderated onboarding sessions with new customers, and a PostHog funnel audit of every step in production.
The findings converged on a single insight: teams weren't stuck on the questions, they were stuck waiting on each other. Every dropout mapped to a moment where the flow assumed one person was doing all the work.
Decisions
The redesign split KYB into a parallel path — admins could invite documents, delegate role assignment, and continue in the app while approvers signed in a separate channel. Progress state moved from a step counter to a live board that everyone on the team could see.
Auto-onboarding pulled trade licence data from government registries where possible. When it couldn't, the form gracefully surfaced only the fields that still needed a human answer.
Adjacent wins
The invoice and receipt system that shipped alongside the onboarding rework was adopted by 80% of active users in its first month. Smart matching cut duplicate submissions by 40% and let finance teams process five times as many receipts per session.
The design system consolidation that supported the work reduced component variants by roughly a third, and I built the handoff patterns that took the design-to-dev cycle from days to hours for the team's most common screens.
Reflection
The biggest lesson wasn't about the flow. It was about how compliance teams narrate their own work. When the interface reflected the way they already talked — pending, waiting, blocked — every screen felt like a relief instead of a demand.