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Turning banking requirements into a simple onboarding
Floodlight was building a financial platform for small businesses, and opening an account came with all the complexity of business banking: identity verification, company details, ownership structure, expected account activity, and the checks required behind the scenes.
This was my first project at Floodlight and a 0→1 challenge. Starting from a list of regulatory requirements rather than an existing product flow, I designed the account-opening experience to make a complex process as clear and simple as possible.
The problem
Opening a business account required collecting a large amount of information about both the applicant and the company. The requirements came from the banking and compliance infrastructure, and were organized around what needed to be verified rather than how a small-business owner would naturally provide it.
There was no existing onboarding flow to improve. The challenge was to turn those requirements into an experience that felt clear and manageable, while asking users for as little manual work as possible.
The solution
I reorganized the regulatory requirements into a guided, modular flow that revealed complexity gradually and adapted to the type of business being onboarded.
Wherever possible, we let the system do the work — pulling existing company information from UK business records and asking users to verify it rather than enter it from scratch.
The result was an onboarding experience that still collected everything required to open an account, but felt much closer to setting up a modern product than filling out a banking application.
Turn a compliance checklist into a guided flow
Instead of presenting users with one long financial questionnaire, I broke the application into small, focused steps and translated regulatory requirements into questions a business owner could easily understand. Progress, clear transitions, and more human copy helped make a necessarily long process feel manageable.
Let the system do the data entry
Rather than asking users to manually enter information we could already access, the flow searched existing UK company records from a business name or registration number. Users could select their company, verify the information we found, and only make changes when something was missing or incorrect.
Adapt the flow to the business
The information required changed depending on the company structure and the applicant’s role. I designed the onboarding as a modular flow, showing ownership, director, company, and personal questions only when they were relevant — including a simpler path for sole traders.
A foundation for Floodlight’s onboarding experience
The flow became Floodlight’s first end-to-end account-opening experience, turning complex regulatory requirements into a clear, modular journey. The structure we created could adapt to different business types and ownership models while keeping the amount of manual input as low as possible.
