Africhange

Cross-Border Remittance | $10M+/mo | 100k+ users

Jun 3, 2020

End-to-end product design for a fast, transparent money transfer app serving African communities in Canada and beyond.

Lead Product Designer

My Role.

Web & Mobile (ios + Android)

Platform.

100,000+ users | $10M+/ Monthly

Users.

The Problem

I joined Africhange on the strength of one conversation. The CEO had personally struggled to send money home after moving to Canada and knew millions of African immigrants faced the same problem: remittance fees as high as 15%, transfers that took days, and a process that demanded a branch visit just to move money to family.

My job wasn't to design an app. It was to resolve a tension that didn't show up in a brief on what compliance needed to protect the business and what a stressed sender needed to trust us with money that mattered.

My Role

Sole product designer, zero to one, across web and mobile. I owned research, architecture, prototyping, testing, and engineering handoff and built the design system that let the team scale from one designer to three without losing consistency.

What I learned from users

I interviewed 18 immigrants across Canada who were already using Western Union, Wise, or MoneyGram. The pattern was consistent: people compared three services before every transfer, not because of price alone, but because no one trusted that the money would arrive as promised. Competitors buried the exchange rate until the final screen. Onboarding asked for full KYC before users had any reason to trust the product enough to provide it.

The insight wasn't "make it faster." It was this: show people exactly what they're going to get, before you ask them to commit.

The decision that mattered most

Every competitor we studied asked for full identity verification upfront. It's the safe, compliance-first default and it was costing them users before the first transfer.  

I proposed splitting KYC into stages: let people explore the app with just an email and password, then introduce verification gradually, with a visible two-step countdown so it never felt like a black box.  

Compliance pushed back full verification upfront; it was their safest path. I didn't argue against the requirement; I argued for a different sequence that hit the same regulatory bar. We agreed on a staged flow that satisfied the compliance checklist without forcing trust before it had been earned. Onboarding completion improved meaningfully in the beta, and it became the pattern the rest of the product followed.  

The same logic shaped the send flow: show the exchange rate, the fee, and the exact amount the recipient will get before the user commits. In testing, this beat the industry-standard "reveal at confirmation" pattern by a wide margin, because it answered the one question every sender actually had.

What changed for the business

100,000+

Users Reached

$10M+

Monthly Volume

70% faster

Delivery Speed

2020

Since.

100,000+ active users, $10M+ in monthly transaction volume

70% faster design-to-engineering handoff, after the design system gave the team which grew from one designer to three a shared language instead of repeated decisions
Onboarding completion and trust signals improved enough that the staged KYC pattern became the default across the product, not just the original test surface

100,000+ active users, $10M+ in monthly transaction volume

70% faster design-to-engineering handoff, after the design system gave the team which grew from one designer to three a shared language instead of repeated decisions
Onboarding completion and trust signals improved enough that the staged KYC pattern became the default across the product, not just the original test surface

100,000+ active users, $10M+ in monthly transaction volume

70% faster design-to-engineering handoff, after the design system gave the team which grew from one designer to three a shared language instead of repeated decisions
Onboarding completion and trust signals improved enough that the staged KYC pattern became the default across the product, not just the original test surface

What I'd do differently

What I’d do differently

I'd push to test the staged KYC pattern with compliance earlier I spent more time than I needed to building the case internally before bringing them real user data. The evidence would have made the conversation shorter and the decision less personal.  

I'd also start the design system from day one instead of retrofitting it once the team grew. It's tempting to treat systems work as a luxury for later; it's actually cheapest when you build it before you need it.

I’d push to test the staged KYC pattern with compliance earlier I spent more time than I needed to building the case internally before bringing them real user data. The evidence would have made the conversation shorter and the decision less personal.  

I’d also start the design system from day one instead of retrofitting it once the team grew. It’s tempting to treat systems work as a luxury for later; it’s actually cheapest when you build it before you need it.

Let's work together ●

Feel free to get in touch at +2348065514210.

Let's work together ●

Feel free to get in touch at +2348065514210.