fintech • 2022 — 2025
My role
associate director – ux
Scaling Cashfree from enterprise-led growth to self-serve merchants
Cashfree had grown around larger merchants, where relationship managers, sales teams and integration support helped customers navigate the product. As the next phase of growth shifted towards SMBs, that model could no longer scale in the same way.
As Associate Director – UX, I led the design team through this shift, working with Product, Engineering and business teams to move key merchant journeys from assisted to increasingly self-serve.
17%
Uplift in Signup → KYC conversion
3.5%
Uplift in Activation → Transaction
46%
Fewer support tickets
3
Core experiences transformed
01 · SMB STRATEGY
Defining the SMB merchant
The shift towards SMBs exposed a fundamental problem: there wasn’t one shared definition of the merchant we were building for. Product, Engineering, Sales, Banking Ops, Legal, Finance and Design each understood a different part of the customer and their journey.
We brought those perspectives together through stakeholder interviews, cross-functional workshops, journey mapping and research across the merchant lifecycle. Instead of starting with product solutions, the work connected what we already knew, surfaced gaps and built a common view of merchant needs and behaviours.
The synthesis converged into four merchant archetypes spanning different levels of technical confidence, business maturity and paths to accepting payments. They gave the organisation a shared reference for shaping the SMB strategy and the experiences that followed.
Cross-functional workshops · Connecting merchant problems across the lifecycle
Merchant lifecycle · Mapping needs and opportunities from awareness through revival
Four SMB archetypes · A shared reference for designing the self-serve experience
02 · ONBOARDING
Making onboarding work without the enterprise support model
Cashfree’s onboarding had evolved around enterprise merchants, where relationship managers and internal teams could help merchants navigate KYC and activation. That model could not scale in the same way for SMBs.
The team reworked the journey around a merchant completing it independently. Requirements became clearer, progress more visible and moments of uncertainty easier to recover from, reducing dependency on assisted support from signup through activation.
The shift was from onboarding supported by people to onboarding supported by the product.
17% ↑ KYC completion
03 · SELF-INTEGRATION
Onboarded didn’t mean transaction-ready
Completing KYC still didn’t make a merchant successful. Before they could accept their first payment, they had to choose an integration path and get Cashfree working with their business, another journey that had traditionally assumed technical knowledge or access to assisted support.
Self-integration became the next piece of the experience. The team worked to make integration paths easier to discover and understand, helping merchants choose an approach suited to their technical confidence and business setup.
The definition of activation moved beyond onboarding to getting a merchant transaction-ready.
↑ 3.5% Activation till First Transaction • Self-integration replacing RM-assisted setup
Self-integration · Helping merchants move from activation to their first transaction with less dependency on assisted support
04 · MERCHANT APP
From transaction log to business companion
Once merchants could get themselves transaction-ready, the next question was what Cashfree should become after the first payment.
The existing app was largely operational, helping merchants inspect transactions and payment activity. For self-serve SMBs running their businesses on the go, there was an opportunity to make it considerably more useful.
The team reimagined the app across the merchant lifecycle, turning payment activity into signals about business health, timely actions and contextual opportunities to grow with Cashfree.
↓ 46% support tickets · ↑ 32% active users · ↓ 18% Uninstalls
Before Transaction-led, operational experience
Revamp
After Business health · Insights · Timely actions · Contextual opportunities
05 · DESIGN LEADERSHIP
The product changed. The design practice had to change with it.
Moving towards self-serve changed more than the journeys we designed. It changed what Design needed to contribute.
Research had to enter earlier, designers needed to work across journeys rather than individual requirements, and Product, Engineering and business partners needed to frame problems together.
The practice increasingly moved from receiving requirements towards helping shape what should be solved, why it mattered and how success would be measured.
Design as an Execution Partner
Design as Strategic Partner across the product lifecycle
OUTCOME
From assisted journeys to a self-serve merchant experience
The shift towards SMBs required more than simplifying individual journeys. It meant aligning the organisation around who the merchant was, reducing dependency across onboarding and integration, and making Cashfree more valuable beyond the transaction itself.
Across these efforts, the product increasingly took on work that previously depended on people, creating a more scalable foundation for self-serve merchant growth.
17% ↑
Signup → KYC conversion
3.5% ↑
Activation → Transaction
46% ↓
Support tickets