We rebuilt payments and discovery, increasing payments per user from 1.3 to 2.9 and lifting activation by 3-5% in spite of tightening compliance constraints.
Our activation rate dropped as acquisition spend scaled. Fix the leaky funnel.
The checkout experience felt frankensteined. Users were bouncing between KYC, partnership promos, and we were conditioning them to care too much about the fee upfront.
The success screen felt anti-climactic. The functional goal: ease the immediate user anxiety that my bill is actually going to be paid on time. By highlighting the exact rewards earned and adding a branded Chexy piggy-bank animation, we replaced a basic confirmation screen with a definitive sense of completion.
At first, KYC came in the middle of the payments flow causing an 11% drop-off. I moved it to the initial new user onboarding and stepped it out to feel much lighter, allowing 65% of users to pass the stage with no further action. From 11% → 2% drop off. For those who did drop off, I added a guided set-up list and iterated into a visual card carousel. One clear next step.
Users will drop off anytime they are sent to gather information. By introducing bill uploading and email forwarding, we can automatically pull this information for them. This drove a 24% activation rate, outperforming the 14–18% baseline. The highest adoption was in high-friction categories for custom providers (23%).
To improve discoverability, we built a full-page search experience. This drove a 45-50% same-day activation spike during tax season, which directly correlated with users immediately setting up a second utility payment.