Redesigning Onboarding for a Neobank

The KYC funnel wasn’t the problem — 89% of people who started verification finished it. The problem showed up after: a nine-day median gap between "account created" and "first transaction sent."

Verified isn’t the same as ready

We mapped every screen a user saw between verification and their first send, and found the app assumed people already knew who they wanted to pay. New users didn’t — they’d downloaded the app for one specific reason, usually a bill or a family transfer, and the home screen didn’t surface it.

We rebuilt first-run to ask one question — "What did you come here to do?" — and routed the next three screens entirely around that answer, skipping every feature that wasn’t relevant yet.

Nine days to under two

Median time-to-first-transaction dropped to under two days within the first month post-launch, and stayed there through a full quarter of new-user cohorts — not just an early-adopter spike.