Modernising the KYC verification process

The challenge

My responsibility was to lead the design of a new customer ID verification product that would be responsive, device-agnostic, and fully white-label. Unlike our existing KYB onboarding portal, this product needed to provide clients with far greater flexibility to customise the interface — from colours and typography to tone of voice — ensuring close alignment with their brand guidelines.

The challenge was to balance this advanced level of customisation with a non-negotiable requirement: the product had to remain fully accessible and meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards, without client customisation negatively affecting legibility, usability, or the overall user experience.

Additionally, I aimed to move as much of the ID processing as possible into the background, keeping it hidden from the user interface. This approach would create a smoother, more seamless end-to-end interaction by reducing the number of steps and physical input required from users.

My approach

To begin, I partnered with our CTO and Product Owner to define user personas and understand the specific requirements of our clients. Weatherby's Private Bank, our first client for this product, provided key client and user requirements helping us to shape this journey. Their customer base required a seamless, frictionless onboarding experience where trust, clarity, and professionalism were reinforced at every step.

I then began to experiment in how we can offer bespoke client branding whilst maintaining accessibility standards and our drive for a high quality user experience. I explored all options of visual customisation, from typeface, type weights, size all the way to colour and entire dark/light mode interface options. Eventually I settled on an offering that would meet both my design and our clients customisation needs.

I collaborated with our technical and front-end leads to assess potential frameworks and we chose PrimeVue as our component library, allowing us to move quickly while maintaining flexibility and scalability.

Alongside this, I designed a new design language and component system that not only supported this ID verification product but also established a foundation for future releases and future products. This system included reusable UI patterns and guidelines to ensure that, even when customised, the product remained consistent, accessible, and compliant.

Recognising the need to balance delivery speed with optimal usability, I created a dedicated Epic in Jira to capture ideal user flows and refinements. While not all could be achieved in the initial release, this ensured the long-term product vision was documented and prioritised for future updates.

Outcome

We created a market-leading verification product that has been extremely well received by clients. The experience delivers on both usability and flexibility, striking the right balance between brand customisation and user-centric design. By allowing clients to tailor the interface to their brand guidelines and tone of voice, while still protecting accessibility and legibility, we ensured that every deployment felt truly bespoke without ever compromising the user experience and our high-level design standards.

The results exceeded expectations. Time-to-completion for users has exceeded initial expectations, with streamlined flows reducing friction and allowing customers to move through verification with greater speed and confidence.

The product has also laid a strong foundation for my wider design strategy. I introduced a new design language and component library that now serves as the foundation for all future customer-facing products. This system has already been successfully extended to our KYB onboarding platform, ensuring consistency, efficiency, and a recognisable design DNA across both user facing products.