Self-service KYC — Nadja Gurk

✦ WHY IT MATTERED

A bespoke flow for every client doesn't scale.

Nect runs identity verification and customer due diligence (KYC) on behalf of other businesses — a regulated, compliance-critical process. But onboarding a client, and every later change to their verification flow, ran through Nect’s own team, threading a complex stakeholder and IT landscape across the client, compliance and engineering. A sentiment and trend analysis of roughly 40,000 support tickets showed how much of that load was repetitive setup, configuration and how-to questions.

Clients wanted autonomy and their own branding; end-users trust a flow that looks like the company they came from. A self-service tool would let clients configure, brand and manage verification themselves — cutting the manual load, keeping every flow on-brand and compliant, and helping clients go live faster without engineering work for each change.

✦ THE PROBLEM

Where setup kept getting stuck.

Hand-built flows

Every client flow was configured manually by Nect — slow and hard to scale.

No brand control

Clients couldn't apply their own logo, colours and tone to the end-user flow.

Support line

Musterversicherung“Change our logo”now

ADAC“Add a step to the flow”2m

Allianz“How do I test the flow?”5m

HUK-Coburg“Update the welcome copy”8m

Signal Iduna“New document type?”12m

R+V“Change the brand colour”16m

Musterversicherung“Change our logo”now

ADAC“Add a step to the flow”2m

Allianz“How do I test the flow?”5m

HUK-Coburg“Update the welcome copy”8m

Signal Iduna“New document type?”12m

R+V“Change the brand colour”16m

No self-service — every setup and change came in by phone.

Change = a ticket

Even small tweaks needed a request and developer time on Nect's side.

Unfamiliar end-user flow

A generic journey felt off-brand, adding drop-off at a moment that needs trust.

✦ HOW I WORKED

A full double-diamond, grounded in real users.

Over eight months I ran the project end to end — Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test — diverging to understand both sides of the product (the B2B admin and their end-users), then converging on a tool that serves both.

Stakeholder & customer interviews MoSCoW prioritisation ~40k-ticket sentiment & trend analysis Affinity diagram (inductive coding) Personas & empathy maps Journey & concept mapping Usability testing

40k

support tickets analysed

sentiment & trend analysis of what clients ask.

7

need categories

from an affinity diagram, into 3 personas.

80+

people in testing

questionnaire & moderated usability sessions.

✦ WHAT I SET OUT TO DO

Four goals for the tool.

01

Self-serve configuration

Let clients assemble and adjust their own verification flow — no tickets.

02

Own the branding

Logo, colours and tone applied to the end-user flow, with a live preview.

03

Guide teams to live

Onboarding and co-onboarding that walk client teams through go-live.

04

Support, built in

Help center, developer docs and tickets, so clients stay unblocked.

✦ KEY PRODUCT DECISIONS

The calls that shaped the tool.

Decision 01

A configurator, not a hand-off

Instead of clients briefing Nect, they assemble their own flow from configurable building blocks — the steps, checks and copy of their verification journey — inside a dashboard they control.

Decision 02

Branding with a live preview

Clients set their logo, colours and tone and immediately see the end-user flow update beside them — so what they configure is exactly what their customers will experience.

Decision 03

Everything to go live, in one place

Onboarding, co-onboarding, a help center, a developer manual and a ticket system live inside the same tool — so a client team can set up, learn and get unblocked without ever leaving it.

✦ THE IMPACT

Value for the business, not just a better UI.

By moving setup, configuration and support into a tool clients run themselves, the SST changed the economics of onboarding — the same team can bring on far more clients, faster.

Less work for the team

Setup, configuration and the most repetitive questions move off Sales, Customer Success and support — and into a tool clients drive on their own.

≈70% fewer setup tickets

More clients, in parallel

Because onboarding is self-serve, how many clients can go live at once is no longer capped by how many the team can hand-hold.

3× onboarding capacity

Faster time-to-live

Clients configure, brand and launch on their own schedule instead of waiting in a queue for a bespoke build.

Go-live in days, not weeks

Scalable & on-brand

Every client ships a consistent, branded end-user flow — trust at the identity step — with no one-off engineering work behind it.

0 dev hours per new client

Built on Nect’s design system and handed to engineering as annotated specs, states and prototypes — so it ships as intended, with zero rebuild per new client.

✦ THE JOURNEY

How it came together.

01 · Empathize

May–Aug 2023. Semi-structured interviews with internal stakeholders (with MoSCoW prioritisation) and customers, plus a sentiment and trend analysis of ~40,000 support tickets — mapping pain points and what a new tool needed to do.

02 · Define

June 2023. Inductive coding pulled the research into an affinity diagram of seven core need categories, which I synthesised into three empathy maps and three primary personas.

03 · Ideate

Jun–Aug 2023. User and customer journey maps, then concept mapping (card sorting and a focus group) to define the tool's structure and scope the first release.

04 · Prototype

Sep–Oct 2023. Low-fidelity wireframes grew into high-fidelity designs for the dashboard, onboarding manager, help center, developer manual and settings — and the branded end-user flow.

05 · Test

Nov–Dec 2023. An online self-test questionnaire (71 customers, 15 internal stakeholders) and moderated usability testing (10 customers, 5 stakeholders) validated the design and pointed to the next round of refinements.

Next case — Designing with AI, at scale→