Case study · 2024
Integrated investment payments.
VentureCrowd's first in-platform payment experience. An end-to-end flow across six payment methods, designed to remove friction at the moment of investment.
Role
Product Designer · Sole designer working alongside Product Owner
The actual payment selection screen — VentureCrowd's first in-platform payment experience, across six methods.
The problem
Investment commitment happened in product. Payment didn't.
Once an investor committed to a deal, payment was coordinated offline — through email threads, bank transfers, and operational follow-up from the funds management team.
As deal volume increased, the process became increasingly difficult to scale. The gaps showed up as payment delays, refunds, reconciliation overhead, and abandoned commitments between investment intent and completed payment.
Before
Manual, fragmented, offline
After
In-platform, one session
The old flow required days of manual coordination — payment instructions by email, bank transfers reconciled by hand. The new flow collapses commit, verify, and pay into a single session.
The solution
Payment Is the Moment of Conversion
The new payment experience sits directly after the investment commitment. In a single session, investors move through a maximum of seven screens and finish the full process in under ten minutes.
Six payment methods are available, with instant options surfaced first. Each one moves through the same progress structure and confirmation state, so the path from commit to confirmed feels continuous.
The decision to integrate Monoova as the payments API was led by the broader team — developers and the CTO. My contribution was the investor experience built on top of it: where payment lived in the flow, how it surfaced choice, and how it connected back to the commitment that preceded it.
Step 01 · Commit
Step 02 · Pay
Step 03 · Confirmed
Commit, pay, confirm — all inside the same session. Payments for investments had never been available on mobile before this project.
Security & identity
One release, two pieces of infrastructure.
Payment was the most visible part of this work, but not the only part.
Verification
Mobile
Address
Manually enter address
Choose verification method
First name
Family name
Passport number
Date of birth
I consent to having this information checked with the Issuer of Official Record Holder
These details will be verified upon submission of investments and you will be informed when successful.
01
KYC inline
Know Your Customer verification is a regulatory requirement for any Australian investment platform. Rather than a separate offline handoff, investors complete identity verification in-platform during the same session — details are collected immediately and verified in the background by Green ID. If verification fails, an automated email prompts the investor to retry with a different method, keeping the process moving without manual intervention.
02
SMS sign-in
Sign-in moved from password to SMS verification — removing forgotten-password friction while raising the platform's security posture on a platform where investors were committing significant capital.
Enter the code sent to +(614) 05 675 658.
Reassurance, not complexity
Investment payments carry significantly more emotional weight than ecommerce.
Unlike a typical checkout, investment payments carry real emotional weight. Investors were often transferring large sums of money while moving through identity verification at the same time. The challenge was creating a flow that felt secure and transparent without overwhelming users with complexity.
The design borrows from familiar checkout conventions — a clear step indicator, a sticky order summary, copyable identifiers, a single primary action — because those patterns are what users already trust. What needed to be different was the framing around them: a visible session timer, an explicit reference number, clear contribution-fee breakdown, and identity verification acknowledged in the same flow rather than handled separately.
Session timer
7-minute window — payment is time-limited, reducing abandoned flows.
PayID identifier
Copyable email — no manual entry, no typos.
Reference number
Auto-generated, unique per transaction.
Fee breakdown
Contribution fee shown inline — no surprise charges at confirmation.
Session timer, copyable PayID identifier, unique reference number, and fee breakdown — all visible before the investor confirms.
Scaling infrastructure
Six methods, one shell.
As VentureCrowd matured, relying on BPAY and manual coordination was no longer sustainable. Multiple payment methods gave investors flexibility and reduced operational dependency on internal teams — but each method enters and exits the same shell. Same progress bar, same confirmation state, same receipt. Investors don't experience six payment products. They experience one investment flow that happens to support six ways of paying.
Outcomes
What changed when payment became part of the product.
Conversion
More paths to payment, less drop-off
- Payment options expanded from one method to six — covering instant, deferred, and device-native patterns
- Fewer steps between investment commitment and completed payment — embedded in the flow, not initiated by email
- Reduced abandoned commitments between intent and completion as investors could act immediately
- Increased conversion by removing the operational gap that previously sat between 'commit' and 'paid'
Mobile & access
A first: investments completable on mobile
- Investors could complete a full investment and payment on mobile for the first time
- Apple Pay and Google Pay introduced device-native one-tap payment for mobile investors
- Removed the desktop dependency that previously blocked anyone discovering VentureCrowd on mobile from converting
Security & operations
More verification, less internal overhead
- 2FA introduced to the platform for the first time — no two-factor authentication existed prior to this project
- KYC verification integrated inline — identity verification no longer required a separate offline handoff
- Increased security and compliance steps while maintaining a consumer-grade experience
- Manual payment coordination eliminated — email instructions, bank transfer chasing, and offline reconciliation removed from the investor path
Reflection
Payment shifted from being an external administrative process into a core part of the investment experience itself.
All work