Onit simplifies banking in Africa with free transactions and tailored financing for small businesses and individuals, driving financial inclusion and growth through innovative, digital solutions.
Mobile App
Deliverables
Interviews
Competitive Analysis
Personas
User flow
Site map
Low Fidelity Designs
High Fidelity Designs
Team
Design
Tools
Figma
Figjam
Jitter
Linear
Notion
Duration
6 Months
Onit is revolutionizing banking in Africa by providing free, hassle-free transactions and customized financing solutions for micro, small, and medium-sized businesses in Kenya. Onit's mission is to empower people and businesses to thrive, using cutting-edge technology to drive financial inclusion and economic growth. Using digital-first approach, Onit makes banking easier, more accessible, and built for your needs.
Shara started as a digital lending platform that quickly gained popularity over the past four years. It has since evolved into Onit Bank, a fully licensed digital bank regulated by the Central Bank of Kenya. Our mission is clear: to offer Kenya’s unbanked population accessible, reliable financial services that empower them to grow both their personal and business finances.
While working on Onit Bank's core product team, I collaborated with two other designers. My key contributions included designing and establishing the core banking flows that enable users to seamlessly send and receive money. I also worked on adapting and fine-tuning existing credit repayment flows to ensure they were intuitive, efficient, and user-friendly. My role involved balancing user needs with business goals, creating designs that made financial transactions simple, reliable, and accessible for Kenya's unbanked population.
After launching the initial MVP, we received valuable user feedback that highlighted areas for improvement. This led to the need for a complete redesign for version 1.0, incorporating all the updates based on the feedback. When the lead designer left, I stepped up as the lead designer on the project. I took charge of the redesign process, leading the effort to create a new and improved design for version 1.0, ensuring it addressed user needs and aligned with the project’s goals.
Millions of small businesses and everyday people across Africa struggle to access basic financial services that should be their right. Traditional banks prioritize big corporations and wealthy clients, leaving small businesses and everyday consumers to deal with complicated processes, high fees, and unfair loan terms. As a result, many people and businesses are either underserved or completely left out of the banking system.
While M-Pesa has transformed digital payments in Kenya and East Africa, it has its own challenges. It's expensive, and most users rely on outdated USSD menus due to data and connectivity issues, making the experience inefficient and limited.
Banks, on the other hand, focus more on making money from transaction fees rather than solving real financial problems or helping people achieve their goals. Onit is here to change that. We're building a fast, transparent, and trustworthy digital banking experience designed to meet the needs of Kenya's unbanked population and close this critical gap.
To gain a deeper understanding of the challenges SMEs face, we conducted comprehensive research involving over 10,000 small businesses in Kenya. The findings showed that SMEs struggle with disjointed financial services, lengthy processes, high collateral demands for credit, and excessive fees for account management and everyday transactions. As a result, many SMEs limit their use of traditional banks to basic transactions, avoiding fully banking their revenue due to the numerous barriers and inefficiencies.
Central to our process was user research and interviews. I carried out interviews and surveys to gather direct insights from our target audience, ensuring our assumptions were grounded in real user experiences. Among those we interviewed were:
These insights enabled us to map the financial ecosystem and pinpoint critical pain points, helping us design smoother, more accessible user journeys tailored to their needs.
To uncover deep insights about our users, we had collaborative research sessions that united our product, design, operations, and engineering teams. These cross-functional workshops revealed valuable perspectives about user interactions at every touchpoint, helping us identify growth opportunities and build genuine empathy for our users' challenges.
Our research was anchored in the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework, a powerful approach that focuses on understanding users' core objectives and success metrics. Through this lens, we uncovered distinct patterns - from corner shop owners struggling to track daily cash flows, to cash office managers racing to process payroll disbursements on time.
These insights directly shaped our solution strategy. Rather than building generic features, we created targeted tools that solved specific, high-value problems for each user segment. For instance, we developed streamlined transaction management for shop owners and automated batch processing for payroll managers. This jobs-focused approach ensured our solutions precisely matched our users' real-world needs."
Age: 26
Occupation: Sales Person
Location: Westlands Merchant
M-Pesa
KCB Bank
Emmanuel Mwangi
Meet Emmanuel, a dedicated and resourceful door-to-door salesperson working for a large distributor. He is the link between large distributors and small local shops. His a sales methodology is simple yet effective: he delivers stock to shops and, in return, collects cash and remaining inventory. His goal is to maintain an accurate record of sales and reconcile cash with listed prices and stock balances at the end of the day. These tools aren't readily available so he tums to using M-Pesa confirmation messages and transaction statements to stay organized. Despite the convenience, Emmanuel is mindful of the need to maintain his ability to offer unofficial credit or adjust prices on the spot, an aspect of his job that enables him to ear extra income.
Jobs to be done
Collect funds and have a clean record of what has been sold against this.
Share IOU's where they have provided short term credit.
Have a ledger available for each retail touchpoint.
Why Onit will be better
Better expertance for my customers as they do not incur any accitional transaction fees if they also have freebank.
How do they do this now?
Reconciliation: returns to warehouse, with cash to reflect sales at listed prices and then stock balances.
Notebook and mpesa confirmation messages/ mpesa statements.
Opportunities for new product features
Ability to share IOUs with a payment link.
Easily accessible ledger for each person I have transacted with on Freebank. This should indicate each individual transaction and a short description of what it was for.
Lots of interactions with people which can be a marketing opportunity for Freebank.
Age: 28
Occupation: Online businesses
Location: CBD
M-Pesa
Quickbooks
Muthoni Mbuga
Muthoni is an ambitious online entrepreneur leveraging social media to broaden her business reach. She uses Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, to showcases her products anf attract a wider customer base. Navigating the world of mobile loans, she remains discerning amidst a sea of providers. She's experimented with various mobile'-an apps but remains non-committal, recognizing that easy access coula lead to increased borrowing. Muthoni's entrepreneurial journey reflects her ambition, her ability to adapt, and her responsible approach to financial management in the bustling online marketplace.
Jobs-to-be-done
Providing customers with receipts/ proof of payment.
Finding and marketing to new customers.
Access to banking platform to carry out transactions and confirm payments
Why Onit will be better?
Payment status in real time and offer digital receipts that businesses can customize.
Share payment link or payment details.
Freebank app will be stable and reliable with efficient customer service to resolve any issues
How do they do this now?
Proof of payment: M-pesa confirmation or phone call to ask for payment confirmation.
Markets to new customers via Instagram ads, Facebook ads/ groups, WhatsApp stories.
Relies on current banking provider/ Mpesa/ Safaricom app
Opportunities for new product features
Opportunities for new product features:
1. Customer discovery
Age: 37
Occupation: Runs FMCG shop
Location: Eastlands
M-Pesa
Equity Bank
Daniel Kavita
Daniel is the dedicated owner of a busy FMCG outlet in Eastlands, frequently processing payments using his M-Pesa till sticker. To expedite transactions, he has dabbled with innovations like the STK push, but finds the system can be unreliable. Confirming transactions presents another hurdle; while customers often share their M-Pesa confirmation message/code as proof of purchase, tracking these becomes increasingly challenging with growing sales volumes.
Further complicating matters, periods of low sales often lead to stock shortages, forcing Daniel to seek credit from multiple banks. However, the terms are often unsuitable and insufficiently tailored to his business needs, exacerbating his operational challenges.
Jobs-to-be-done
Collections: purchases from shop
Depositing money from collections into their primary bank account
Providing customers with receipts/ proof of payment
Reconciling sales
Why Onit will be better?
The outlet owner will avoid the transaction fees. associated with receiving money into tills.
The business owner will be charged a maximum of 0.5% and not more than KES 200 per transaction for money collected on the till. Below KSh200 is free.
If they move the money to their general Freebank account.
There will be no cost associated. is there an opportunity to also make the journey shorter and smoother than navigating the USSD flow.
Can we create an option for a merchant to generate a receipt for any inflow recorded on their till statement?
How do they do this now?
The outlet owner will avoid the transaction fees. associated with receiving money into tills.
The business owner will be charged a maximum of 0.5% and not more than KES 200 per transaction for money collected on the till. Below KSh200 is free.
If they move the money to their general Freebank account.
There will be no cost associated. is there an opportunity to also make the journey shorter and smoother than navigating the USSD flow.
Can we create an option for a merchant to generate a receipt for any inflow recorded on their till statement?
We conducted an in-depth study of the financial ecosystem in Africa, focusing on how SMEs interact with consumers, suppliers, and financial institutions. Our research revealed that many SMEs depend heavily on cash transactions and informal lending networks due to the high costs, inefficiencies, and barriers associated with traditional banking services. We also analyzed the adoption and usage patterns of digital payment solutions and mobile money systems across the region.
To help the team better understand the ecosystem’s interconnectedness, we developed the Onit Persona Map using Midjourney and FigJam. This visualization highlights key insights and relationships within the ecosystem, serving as a valuable tool for aligning our approach to solving these challenges.
Armed with insights from our research, we began crafting Onit to tackle the challenges faced by SMEs. Key design decisions included:
• Digital KYC Process: Simplifying account creation with a digital Know Your Customer (KYC) process, enabling users to open accounts in under two minutes.
• Zero Transaction Fees: Allowing SMEs to collect revenues from bank transfers and mobile money providers without incurring transaction fees.
• Intuitive Interface: Designing a user-friendly experience for SMEs and consumers to effortlessly manage their finances.
We started with competitor analysis to better understand the current landscape and merchants’ realities. By exploring onboarding and KYC flows across African and global financial apps like Chipper Cash, NCBA, NALA, and Abeg, we identified familiar patterns and optimized the number of steps to align with user expectations.
To validate our designs, we developed interactive prototypes and tested them with users, gathering critical feedback through field testing and workshops. Tools like UXCam enabled us to study user flows, while in-person sessions allowed us to refine designs iteratively based on real-world input.
Building a design system was pivotal at this stage. It established a consistent design language and reusable components, ensuring efficiency as we added features and expanded Onit’s offerings. Documenting these standards allowed the team to maintain coherence and understand the rationale behind every design decision.
We carried out comprehensive testing to ensure our solutions effectively addressed the needs of our target users. This involved both usability testing with SMEs and consumers and rigorous technical testing to guarantee the platform’s reliability and security. Insights from these tests shaped iterative improvements to enhance functionality and the overall user experience.
Key steps in our testing and iteration process included:
• Prototype Testing: Early prototypes were tested with a small group of SMEs to gather feedback on usability, functionality, and pain points.
• Beta Launch: A beta version of Onit was released to a broader audience, enabling real-world testing and refinement based on user behavior and feedback.
• Continuous Feedback Loop: Ongoing user feedback was collected, analyzed, and incorporated into regular updates, driving continuous platform enhancements.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Close coordination with product managers and developers ensured alignment on design goals and seamless integration of innovative solutions. This collaborative approach fostered creativity and empowered the team to consistently deliver value to businesses and consumers.
