To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. The information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of BGOGO or USDOfficial.
As a financial activity platform, USDOfficial requires a KYC (Know Your Customer) system to verify the identity of its users. The process takes a few steps without physically seeing the person. And the purpose of doing it was to avoid potential risks of illegal intention for participating in financial activities.
The main goal was to establish the user’s identity when enabling financial activities, such as depositing, withdrawing, trading, and making payments.
The KYC procedure that I designed focuses on dealing with business to customers; the organization users need to contact USDOfficial customer services to process KYC by providing different documents. Because USDO is a high profit and high risk product, security and risk assessment are top priorities. It requires the users to provide the necessary information and photos for identifying personal identity.
1. How much do users know about KYC?
I did research on users first and then the market. With the user research, I learned that KYC has been widely used not only in financial services worldly but also in social media and e-commerce, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Airbnb. Thus, KYC shouldn’t be too unfamiliar for most people.
2. What do users think of KYC?
Everybody in the marking team is an expert in the crypto trading world. Thus, I interviewed 5 of them to gain a deep understanding of their feelings and frustrations. Then, I developed the following empathy map based on the findings.
People’s attitudes toward KYC tend to be a bit negative. They worry about their personal information leaking so that they don’t trust new products in the beginning. They think the process is very troublesome, so they give up signing up an account for this new product halfway or randomly put the information to speed up the process. All that will hurt the reliability of the data, which damages the business, from the company’s perspective.
For the market research, I did competitor analysis, investigating how other products approach this feature. I studied the products the interviewees mentioned to understand users' expectations further. Banks provide the highest level of security. Therefore, in addition to Crypto-related platforms, I researched N26, a German neobank, and TransferWise, an online money transfer service. Furthermore, I also looked up Airbnb and investigated how they approached this feature.
KYC is a process asking users to provide personal information to verify their identifications for maximum data security and prevents its users from breach or theft. As cryptocurrency investors, they want to have a smooth experience with low friction when participating in investment activities to accomplish their goals efficiently and delightfully. Therefore, the main problem I am solving here is to find the balance of security and efficiency.
1. Follow convention
Competitor analysis shows that almost all KYC processes follow a similar procedure: select ID type, take photos of both sides of ID, and take a selfie. I decided to follow this convention and take advantage of users’ existing knowledge from other products they used before.
2. Exempt verification from the onboarding process
Usually, new users must go through the verification process when they sign up for accounts. However, for a new product, to onboard users without obstacles is significantly important; to insist users pass the verification initially will deviate from it due to the lack of trust. Most users would hesitate to give their personal information and fail to finish signing up an account, thereby losing the customers we have won in the fiercely competitive market.
Therefore, I decided to welcome new users to explore the product first and verify their identity when needed. Then, there are four scenarios that KYC is required:
3. Lower security threshold to small customers
Again, the new product needs users. Small customers are important, and we need to gain their trust first. Providing a “trial period’ for them helps grow user registration as we are winning their trust by giving trust in them first.
Then, following the scenarios, I outlined the user flows, showing the experience of how to accomplish the KYC process and all possible verification statuses.
