Streamlining Digital Engagement for Merchants & Partners

In a rapidly evolving payments landscape, established players face growing pressure from disruptors like Stripe and Square. These competitors are redefining expectations with digital-first, automated solutions that simplify payment processing.

To stay competitive, we embarked on a mission to transform our client’s digital experience by streamlining and modernizing key processes. The goal was to empower merchants and partners with a seamless, self-service platform that prioritized automation, user-friendly design, and efficiency.

This case study explores how we identified critical pain points, leveraged innovative design principles, and delivered a solution that positions our client as a forward-thinking leader in the payments space.

Project type

B2B FinTech (Service Design)

Project Status

🚀 Funded to launch venture

Impact

• Mapped end to end service blueprint

• Developed “Future State” journey for 2 target personas

• Secured funding to from SteerCo to build phase 1 initiative

Timeline

6 Weeks

Team

Expert Partner

UX Manager & Senior Designer

2 Engineers

3 Business Consultants

Who we focused on

The main focus for this project centered around two key partners, “Integrated Payment Providers” and “Merchant Bankers”, while keeping the end customers (merchants) top of mind.

Integrated Payments Providers (SMB)

These companies embed payment processing capabilities directly into software solutions, point-of-sale (POS) systems, or other business tools.

  • Purpose: They provide businesses with end-to-end solutions that combine payment processing with other business functions (e.g., inventory management, invoicing, or CRM).

  • Key Features:

    • Seamless integration with other software/tools.

    • Developer-friendly APIs for custom solutions.

Merchant Banking Partners (Enterprise)

These are traditional financial institutions or banks that provide merchant accounts and facilitate payment processing for businesses.

  • Purpose: They handle the financial side of transactions, including credit card processing, settling funds, and managing the merchant's relationship with card networks (e.g., Visa, Mastercard).

  • Key Features:

    • Focus on compliance, risk management, and financial services.

    • Provides white glove support for high-volume/enterprise merchants.

Understanding the Current State

To identify key pain points and opportunities for improvement, we conducted 7 in-depth user interviews with partners, gaining valuable insights into their experiences and challenges. Additionally, we collaborated with 10 internal cross-functional subject matter experts to map the end-to-end journey. This comprehensive research provided a clear understanding of the current state and laid the foundation for a user-centered, actionable design strategy.

Common Themes:

1. Complexity in Onboarding: Manual processes led to delays and a disjointed onboarding experience.

2. Limited Self-Service Options: Merchants and partners needed to rely on support teams for basic tasks.

3. Lack of Personalization: Standardized service offerings did not fully meet the unique needs of merchants and partners.

4. High Call Volumes: Limited digital capabilities drove up call center interactions, increasing operational costs.

Based on the feedback from user interviews we built out a detailed service blueprint of the end to end journey from Discovery to Add-On Services.

The Proof is in The Data

Key Findings from our data analysis on the service blueprint led to top-of-funnel issues as a primary driver:

  • Slowing/stopping attrition has significant value at stake (~$200M)

    • Complex product offerings span the E2E journey which could lead to selling the wrong products, generating pricing frictions and high-volume troubleshooting cases for agents

    • Lack of proactive and transparent communication linked to unexpected charges was a main driver (~23% of survey responses)

    • Issue resolution was also a driver of attrition (~22% of survey responses), partly due to persistent product, billing, and service issues

    • Partners go through a steep learning curve to become effective at managing tools available

    • Partners don't have the right materials to position solutions effectively to merchants

Leading a Hybrid Workshop to Deliver Strategic SteerCo Recommendations

In a pivotal hybrid workshop, we brought together cross-functional stakeholders to align on key opportunities identified during the research phase and our collaboration effort.

Using interactive activities and data-driven insights, we prioritized pain points, brainstormed solutions, and refined ideas into actionable recommendations. The workshop fostered alignment and clarity, enabling us to present a cohesive strategy to the SteerCo for informed decision-making.

SteerCo Recommendations

After the hybrid workshop and the end of the 6 week engagement, we got buy-in across internal teams and from the SteerCo to:

  • Accelerate top-of-the-funnel, self-service capabilities

  • Perform a quick discovery sprint to uncover enablers and roadblocks to comprehensive merchant-level data access across the org