KYC SaaS Platform
Discover the "real life" of your customers
KYC platform design
Know Your Customer (KYC) is the process of identifying and verifying a client’s identity—a critical function for assessing and monitoring customer risk.
Traditionally, these procedures are conducted manually by reviewing customer documents and history, requiring significant time and effort. The KYC solution leverages cutting-edge web intelligence and AI capabilities to provide deeper insights into customer activity, quickly and effortlessly. This helps mitigate risks, prevent financial fraud, and combat money laundering.
The platform enables businesses to:
- Establish customer identity
- Understand the nature of customer activities, ensuring the legitimacy of their funds
- Assess money laundering risks associated with each customer
- Monitor ongoing customer activity
- Generate a comprehensive risk score for each customer
Product and Business Goals
🎛️ Optimize KYC Processes – Improve verification workflows for both corporate and individual clients
📔 Rapid Information Collation – Enable fast and efficient gathering of all customer-related data
🧶 Strengthen Risk Management – Provide tools for proactive risk assessment and fraud prevention
⚗️ Enhance Due Diligence – Ensure accurate, efficient, and compliant customer evaluations
🏞️ Deliver an Intuitive Experience – Design a user-friendly platform that simplifies complex processes
My Role
- Concept
- Research
- Mockups
- Prototyping
Team
- 1 Product Designer
- 1 Product Manager
Exploration Strategy and Research Methods
The process was challenging and required a high level of creativity. Since this was an innovative prototype—the first of its kind—I had no opportunity to test an existing product or observe users interacting with a similar solution.
I had to conceptualize the product from the ground up, defining use cases, designing screens, and crafting the interface from scratch.
Key Steps in the Process:
-
KYC Industry Overview – Understanding industry needs and trends
- Competitive Analysis – Identifying gaps and opportunities in the market
- Use Case Development – Defining real-world scenarios for product interaction
- SWOT Analysis – Assessing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
1. KYC Industry Overview
As KYC was a new domain for me, I started from the fundamentals:
- What is KYC?
- What problems does it solve?
- When, where, and by whom is it used?
- What key features are essential?
- How should the product look and function?
To gain a comprehensive understanding, I conducted in-depth market research to analyze the industry landscape, assess market size and trends, identify key customer segments, and uncover existing challenges and opportunities. This foundational knowledge helped shape the product’s direction and ensure its relevance in the evolving KYC space.
The Three Pillars of KYC Verification
Customer Identification Program (CIP)
It’s the collection and verification of customer information from real documents, including National ID card, Passport, and business registration certificates.
Customer Due Diligence (CDD)
It’s the process where relevant information about the customer is collected and evaluated for any potential risk to the organization or money laundering/terrorist financing activities.
Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD)
A collection of additional information that provides a higher level of investigation and a more profound knowledge of customer activity to alleviate associated risks.
2. Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis provides a deeper understanding of what competitors are doing and offering to customers.
I conducted an analysis of companies within the KYC industry to assess existing solutions against my product’s vision. As my platform was the first of its kind, this research was crucial in identifying industry standards, functionality, and opportunities for innovation.
This process helped me build domain knowledge and refine the platform’s content and features. One key outcome was a high-level breakdown of content and functionality:
- Content – Informational pages that educate and guide users.
- Functionality – Features enabling user interaction and navigation.
3. Use Case Development
Customer Approval
Companies onboarding new business customers must conduct KYC due diligence to mitigate financial, legal, and reputational risks. KYC reports provide essential insights for banks, auditors, investors, potential partners, and regulatory bodies, ensuring informed and compliant decision-making throughout the approval process.
Risk Review & Due Diligence
KYC analysis is crucial for new business onboarding, contract updates, and relationship termination. These reports help risk departments detect fraud, prevent suspicious activities, and enhance security measures. They also play a key role in risk forensics, remediation, and ensuring regulatory compliance.
Compliance Monitoring
A robust KYC platform optimizes compliance reviews, portfolio evaluations, and periodic business re-approvals. By automating and streamlining processes, it reduces the time, effort, and costs associated with regulatory oversight, helping businesses stay ahead of compliance requirements.
4. Swot Analysis
A SWOT analysis is a powerful tool in the discovery phase, providing a comprehensive overview of the product landscape. It helps uncover key insights by examining four critical areas: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, ensuring a well-rounded understanding of the product’s potential and challenges.
Designing the Look & Feel
How do you create a compelling look and feel for a product that hasn’t been built? My first objective was to ensure that the interface embodied the core idea of “getting the right information at the right moment.” This meant prioritizing clarity, accessibility, and intuitive data presentation—starting with the platform’s landing screen and a dynamic, data-driven dashboard.
Key Dashboard Elements:
- Continuously Updating Status List – A live feed of status updates to monitor risks in real time, enabling quick detection of unusual activity and streamlining decision-making with on-demand reporting.
- Real-Time Interactive World Map – A visual model highlighting countries and new findings, giving users a comprehensive, at-a-glance overview of their company’s global portfolio.
- Risk-Level Distribution Chart – A data visualization displaying the ratio of Known vs. Unknown customers in the portfolio, segmented by risk level for better analysis and risk management.
Beyond the dashboard, another key objective was visualizing customer connection networks.
Given the platform’s extensive textual data and diverse relationship structures, I designed an infographic-style visualization to represent customer connections in an intuitive, easily digestible format. This approach made it simpler to identify relationships, spot anomalies, and gain meaningful insights at a glance.
Ideation
Before finalizing the design, I created initial screen drafts to explore different layouts, interactions, and information hierarchies. These drafts served as a blueprint for structuring the platform’s interface, ensuring clarity and usability from the start.
Key considerations in this phase included:
- Prioritizing essential data – Highlighting critical insights on the landing screen and dashboard.
- Ensuring seamless navigation – Structuring workflows for an intuitive user experience.
- Enhancing visual hierarchy – Designing layouts that emphasize key actions and insights.
Design Drafts
Before moving into the final design, I created design drafts to experiment with structure, layout, and visual hierarchy. These drafts helped refine key elements of the platform, ensuring an intuitive and data-driven experience.
These drafts served as the foundation for wireframing and testing, ensuring a seamless transition to high-fidelity designs.
Key focus areas included:
- Dashboard Composition – Structuring key metrics, real-time updates, and visual insights for quick decision-making.
- User Interaction Flow – Mapping intuitive navigation to streamline onboarding and daily operations.
- Data Visualization – Exploring different ways to present customer risk levels, connection networks, and global insights effectively.
Outcome
The challenge was to create a KYC platform capable of handling Big Data while optimizing how this information is processed, visualized, and managed.
To achieve this, I conducted in-depth research and market analysis to design a prototype from scratch—a first-of-its-kind solution tailored for presale needs. This innovation contributed to business expansion, strengthening the company’s market position and capabilities.
My primary goal was to develop a simple yet powerful solution that maximized user value. The result was a platform that redefined how KYC tools function, introducing a more intuitive, insight-driven experience. I focused on creating a seamless flow of customer data, offering a 360-degree view of their online presence. This tool enables businesses to uncover hidden connections, unregistered business activities, and potential operational risks across different regions.