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Redesigning Grof Onboarding: from uncertainty to a transparent compliance-first experience
Q1-Q2 2024 • Senior Product Designer
The Why
When new companies signed up for Grof's services, their representatives completed a two-page onboarding form. Although the process took less than a minute, it shifted much of the work to internal compliance teams, resulting in lengthy manual reviews and longer wait times before applications could be approved.
At the same time, the largest money laundering case in Singapore exposed vulnerabilities in financial regulations. Grof had to quickly adapt to stricter regulatory requirements.
The onboarding journey was fragmented across online forms, emails, and offline interactions, making the process inefficient and difficult for users to follow.
The How
We combined insights from internal stakeholders, customer support tickets, Hotjar session recordings, and audit findings to identify the biggest friction points across the onboarding journey. Together, we mapped the end-to-end experience, prioritized opportunities based on business impact, and explored solutions that could improve both compliance efficiency and the customer experience.
During discovery, stakeholders also identified an opportunity to introduce Grof's financial products earlier in the onboarding journey, allowing us to incorporate this business objective into the redesign.
The What
Expand onboarding for all client types
Expanded the onboarding system by introducing a new Incorporation flow, allowing users to submit the incorporation details and their proposed company name with built-in validation aligned with Singapore's naming regulations.
User Impacts
Reduced user friction by providing dedicated onboarding flows & company information visibility.
Collect complete KYB & KYC information upfront
User Impacts
Reduced user friction by providing dedicated onboarding flows & company information visibility.
Increase transparency with application tracking
Designed an application status tracker that provides real-time visibility into the review progress, current status, and clear next steps for users.
User Impacts
Reduced user uncertainty and minimized status-check inquiries to the CSS team.
The Outcome
Rolled out the new onboarding for both new and existing clients in July 2024. As of May 2025, 500+ companies and their stakeholders successfully completed the new process.
Enabled Grof to meet new regulatory requirements while continuing to onboard customers at scale.
Increased internal team efficiency by 30% by eliminating manual data entry, aligning the work-progress tracking across teams, and centralizing document storage.
The Outcome
As the Senior UI/UX Designer, I led the end-to-end design process, including stakeholder workshops, journey mapping, interaction design, wireframing, prototyping, usability validation, and close collaboration with a product manager and engineers throughout implementation.
Building the new compliance onboarding process felt like diving into multiple pools at once, balancing operational realities, client expectations, and evolving government regulations. Also, finding the “sweet spot”.
This project taught me an important lesson: some products aren’t meant to be “finished”. In regulated environments, design is a continuous process that must evolve alongside policy changes and enforcement standards.
The most up-to-date version of the product lives in Grof’s platform itself.