Project Context
This project was part of Xendit's initiative in driving their regionalization in Southeast Asia. Our team was consisted of two UX researchers, two product managers and another product designer. I served mainly as the UX strategist, whose task was designing the account structure and account creation flow.
• Role: Design / UX Strategist
• Role: Design / UX Strategist
• Scope: UX strategy
• Timeline: 1 quarter (September - December 2022)
Background Context
Xendit is a leading fintech company providing payment infrastructure for businesses across Southeast Asia. As the company expanded beyond Indonesia into regional markets, it began onboarding enterprise merchants with more sophisticated operational and compliance needs. See some of the use cases below:
Enterprise Use Case Example — NinjaVan
NinjaVan operates across multiple countries and verticals (e.g., transport, delivery, etc). Each country’s headquarter acts as a parent entity overseeing several sub-accounts, representing its various business lines. This structure supports:
• Accounting reconciliation per vertical
• Regional billing and compliance segregation
• Multi-level approval systems for payments and disbursements
Multi-Brand Use Case Example — Sari Roti Group
Sari Roti operates multiple retail brands within one country. Their HQ manages financial visibility and control across all brands (via a parent account) while each brand operates autonomously (via sub-accounts) to handle payments, user permissions, and customer experiences.
These patterns reflect a larger shift in Xendit’s customer base, requiring:
• Customizable account hierarchies
• Multi-level access and permission control
• Regional and vertical segmentation for reporting and compliance
However, the existing system was not built to handle such organizational complexity.
Problems
Goals
Increase Structural Flexibility
• Introduce a parent–child account model that supports multi-level organizations
• Enable merchants to customize account relationships and permissions without engineering intervention.
Streamline Account Creation & KYC
• Redesign the onboarding flow to reuse verified merchant data
• Reduce redundant KYC submissions and shorten the onboarding lead time by X%.
Enable Self-Serve Scalability
• Design an intuitive, self-serve account creation experience that allows enterprise users to create and manage sub-accounts independently.
How might we design a scalable account creation system that empowers enterprise merchants to manage their account on their own — while maintaining compliance efficiency?
Research
My research combined the insights across different stakeholders:
• Previous user research (with merchants) – to understand merchants' needs of account configurations
• Internal stakeholders (with account managers) – to identify behavior patterns and pain points during onboarding
• Competitor review – to analyze industry best practices and assess its applicability to Xendit's use cases
The outcome of these research insights are to shape the account structure model and principles
Research Insight – Merchants Behavior
Based on our interviews, we gathered that:
Merchants came to Xendit for specific projects only and for trial purposes
• The intention of creating a parent account and sub-accounts come at a later stage, when they've convinced with the value of Xendit's products.
No commonality in terms of the timing and frequency of account creation
• It varies depending on each merchants' organization maturity and business needs (e.g opening a new business vertical, business expansion to other countries, etc)
No common preference in account structure
• Each merchant has different approach to how they structure their accounts.
• Some want to start from one business vertical first, before adding another vertical and creating a parent to hold them all.
• While others may prefer to create the parent account first, before creating the sub-accounts (for their verticals or branch offices) to be nested under it).
Considering the fragmented customer segments Xendit serves, this means the account creation must follow these principles:
• Modular – treat any account as lego blocks that can be built on top of another, and allow merchant to freely set which account serves as the parent account
•Agnostic (event and timing-wise) – allow merchant to add and evolve the structure their accounts as their business grow
