Context
Credimi wanted to change how Italian SMEs get access to credit, which is notoriously hard in Italy. Between 200 and 1,000 companies a month went through its onboarding, and every one of them had to be identified first: the Know Your Customer process, or KYC.
Problem
KYC usually means a long, multi-step form that takes weeks: documents to submit, human checks at several stages. At Credimi completion sat between 70% and 80%, and the process took about two weeks from start to finish. The goal: break the 90% completion barrier and bring the time down to three days.
Some things could not change: regulation fixes the exact sentences and explanations the user has to read. The design had to work around them, not rewrite them.
Key decision: a form that isn’t a funnel
User interviews and data analysis pointed at the same thing: people stopped when they lacked one piece of information and couldn’t go on. So the multi-step form stayed, but it was no longer a rigid funnel. Users could jump between sections and provide whatever they had at the time, which cut the interruptions dramatically.
Document and identity checks ran in real time, removing the wait for over 80% of users. The others got a phone call from the team.
Errors were handled by a simple state machine and validation rules: if a KYC failed because of missing fields, the user only had to fix those, without losing anything already filled in.
Outcome
- Completion rate from 70–80% to 94%
- Average time from about two weeks to 3.8 days, close to the three-day goal
- No more waiting on checks for over 80% of users
What I’d do differently
I’d redesign the internal human flow too, and bring the stakeholders into the design much earlier. The real friction wasn’t with customers but with internal adoption: changing tools is hard when you’ve worked with the old one for four years.
