Collect

Re-engineering payment systems and enterprise account management to scale commerce across emerging markets.

RoleProduct Design

ClientCollect

Duration3 months

Year2021

Re-engineering payment systems and enterprise account management to scale commerce for businesses across the African continent

Collect is a fintech infrastructure engineered to resolve payment friction for African businesses. By unifying fragmented operations and automating manual bottlenecks, empowering enterprises to scale.

In a market where fragmented payment rails and auditing hurdles stifle growth, Collect provides the critical infrastructure for businesses to scale. I led the product’s evolution from a conceptual framework into a high-velocity financial ecosystem. By prioritizing operational utility, I designed a unified system that integrates multi-channel payment acceptance, automated reconciliation, and real-time capital management.

Solving Fragmented Liquidity in a High-Growth Market

In a landscape of fragmented rails and manual reconciliation, Collect provides the infrastructure for businesses to scale. I led its evolution from a concept into a high-performance ecosystem, shifting the mental model toward unified financial orchestration. This framework bridges traditional commerce and digital standards, integrating multi-channel acceptance, bank transfers, POS, and online links, with automated tools for reconciliation and real-time capital management.

The Problem: Fragmented rails (too many ways to pay that don't talk to each other) and manual bottlenecks (auditing is a nightmare for these businesses).
The Constraints: Navigation of local regulatory shocks and technical integration hurdles (e.g., integrating multiple APIs like Mono and Okra to ensure uptime).
The Mental Model: Moving users from viewing payments as a "chore" to seeing them as a "growth lever" through unified data.
My Strategic Role: I shaped Collect from a single Direct-Debit feature into a full-suite "Financial OS" that merchants run their daily operations on, owning the design end-to-end alongside product and engineering.

Design Execution: Translating Strategy into High-Velocity Tools

Moving beyond a collection of APIs to build a unified business command center. I focused on stripping away "transactional noise" so African enterprises can manage multi-channel liquidity with the same ease as a single bank account.

Onboarding: Getting Businesses Started, Fast.

The Problem: The original design suffered from high drop-off rates because it forced every user through a rigid flow that demanded sensitive corporate data like director signatures and officer info upfront.

The “How”: I introduced a clear choice between "Business" and "Individual" paths to tailor requirements. This meant a freelancer could skip corporate-heavy hurdles like "Memorandum of Association" or "Director BVNs" that are strictly for registered companies.

My Approach: Using progressive disclosure, I grouped fields into logical steps so users only see what is relevant to their specific track. By saving progress at every stage, I ensured that if a user needs to pause to find a document, they never have to start the process over.

Onboarding: Getting Businesses Started, Fast.

A Dashboard Built for Clarity

The Problem: Most dashboards act like cluttered spreadsheets, overwhelming users with raw data and making it impossible to spot critical trends or payment failures at a glance.

The How: I shifted to a "glanceable" UI, replacing dense tables with high-impact visualizations like live revenue trends and success rate rings to tell a clear story of business health.

My Approach: I prioritized speed to action by placing mission-critical metrics at the top. To support power users and accountants, I added a sidebar switcher that allows them to jump between multiple entities or add new businesses instantly without leaving their workflow.

Customer Relationship Enablement

The Problem: Most dashboards treat customers as static data points rather than relationships. For subscription-based businesses, failing to engage existing users is a costly mistake that forces a constant, expensive hunt for new leads.

The How: I integrated a CRM that enables direct email and SMS messaging from the dashboard. This centralizes communication into a single thread, ensuring businesses stay connected without jumping between multiple apps.

My Approach: I prioritized retention as a growth strategy. By automating personalized outreach for milestones like birthdays and holidays, I helped businesses focus on their "customer retro" keeping current users happy and reducing the need for high-cost acquisition.

Automated Revenue with Plans & Subscriptions

The Problem: Managing recurring services is a logistical nightmare. For many businesses, tracking who is subscribed to what and which payments have cleared feels like a manual guessing game, leading to missed revenue and broken service cycles.

The How: I built a centralized hub that gives businesses a bird’s-eye view of their entire subscription ecosystem. It provides a transparent list of every subscriber and their full payment history, ensuring the team can monitor the health of each service in real time.

My Approach: I focused on maintaining a continuous lifecycle rather than reacting to churn. By automating custom reminders at 1-week, 3-day, and 1-day intervals, I ensured subscribers are always aware of upcoming renewals, keeping them active and engaged without the business ever having to lift a finger.

Automated Revenue with Plans & Subscriptions

Global Payments and Transfers

The Problem: Moving money between global branches or paying international vendors is often fragmented. Without a unified system, businesses struggle to track cross-border flows or maintain oversight, leading to accounting gaps.

The How: I designed a unified payment engine that enables transfers to bank accounts across Africa and beyond directly from the dashboard. This allows entities in different locations, like Abuja to New York, to initiate transactions from a single account.

My Approach: I prioritized security through custom approval chains, ensuring necessary parties sign off before funds are sent. Every transaction is automatically documented, creating a transparent audit trail that simplifies global accounting.

Collaborative User Management

The Problem: Managing financial data is a security risk when access is "all or nothing". Both small teams and global corporations struggle to delegate tasks without exposing sensitive information or creating bottlenecks.

The How: I built a granular permission system that allows businesses to scale safely. Organizations can assign specific roles like Accountants or Ops, ensuring team members only access data relevant to their branch or function.

My Approach: I focused on precision and control. By allowing for custom roles and specific action-based permissions, I ensured the dashboard remains a secure, optimized workspace for every user, regardless of team size.

Frictionless Payment Links

The Problem: Manually generating invoices for every transaction is a time sink. Traditional billing lacks the flexibility customers expect, often forcing them into rigid payment methods that create friction at checkout.

The How: I designed a versatile Payment Link system that acts as a reusable portal. Businesses can share a single link that supports multiple payment methods, allowing customers to pay via their preferred channel, saving time and reducing administrative stress.

My Approach: I prioritized adaptability for B2B and eCommerce. The system allows businesses to set fixed amounts or let customers define the value, making it perfect for both service-based billing and integrated eCommerce checkout flows.

Account Reconciliation & Balancing

The Problem: Fragmented financial data is a silent killer for growth. When digital and offline payments live in separate silos, businesses cannot see their true balance, making long-term planning nearly impossible.

The How: I developed a reconciliation engine that links external bank accounts directly to the platform. This automatically captures and cross-references every digital movement against internal records to ensure accuracy.

My Approach: I created an all-encompassing source of truth. By providing a dedicated path to register cash payments alongside digital transactions, I ensured the system remains scalable and audit-ready, regardless of how a business collects its revenue.

Mobile Wasn’t Optional

Over 60% of target users are mobile-first, making the smartphone the primary entry point for managing their business. I didn't just aim for parity; I designed for engagement, ensuring that checking balances, generating payment QR codes, and monitoring live revenue charts felt native and effortless on the go.

By prioritizing high-frequency actions and glanceable data, the mobile experience became a retention tool that allows business owners to maintain full transparency and control without being tied to a desk.

Impact & Business Results

80% Lower Acquisition Effort: Automated retention tools and "customer retro" insights allowed businesses to focus on keeping current users happy rather than expensive lead hunting.
60% Higher Engagement: Optimizing for mobile utility turned the dashboard into the primary daily tool for the majority of the user base.
Zero-Gap Accounting: Digital bank syncing paired with cash transaction tracking gave merchants a clean, defensible audit trail and turned reconciliation from a multi-day exercise into a same-day one.

Reflections

Transparency Drives Trust: Clear financial visibility and automated reminders reduce friction between businesses and their subscribers.
Efficiency Over Complexity: Shifting from manual tracking to automated hubs allows owners to focus on strategic growth rather than administrative tasks.
Security at Scale: Granular permissions ensure that global organizations can delegate tasks to hundreds of members without compromising sensitive data.

Enterprise treasury teams replaced four tools with one.

Measured and reported by the Collect team in the first quarter after the redesigned platform shipped.

Five-figure

Merchant accounts active inside the first quarter, per the team's read.

Sharp drop

Time-to-reconcile for the average mid-market customer.

Many → one

Number of tools the average team needs to run payouts end-to-end.

Enterprise software is forgiven for being ugly. It is not forgiven for being slow. The redesign was a discipline of cutting clicks, not adding features. Sales conversations got shorter as a result.

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