Managing MSMEs

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Sector

Business | Management

Service

Web Application

UI/UX

Product Design

Design Documentation (Notion)

Live | India | 2024

Managing MSMEs is a B2B SaaS platform

which help build trust & transparency between Businesses with their Customers & Vendors.

Note: Project is under NDA, hence some

details are omitted & left out

Managing MSMEs, Building trust & transparency

A B2B SaaS web application which help provides services focused on enhancing transparency and trust between businesses and their vendors or customers. Its primary offerings include KYC and due diligence processes, aimed at providing accurate and fast data on the compliance and financial history of business partners. This data helps businesses make informed decisions about their partnerships, reducing risks like bad debts and optimizing credit periods

The Problem

Enhancing Trust and Operational Efficiency for Businesses through a Secure, Role-Based KYC &

Compliance Management System

Businesses often face significant challenges in establishing trust with their customers and vendors due to a lack of transparency and secure access to critical data, such as KYC (Know Your Customer), compliance history, and financial statements. Furthermore, managing multiple vendors and customer relationships across various business entities introduces operational complexity, especially when different team members require tailored access based on roles and permissions.

Key Challenges

The core challenge is creating a streamlined and secure platform that not only simplifies vendor-customer management but also enhances trust through transparent data sharing, while accommodating role-based access control and multi-business functionality, all within a subscription-based framework.

Vendor and Customer Management Scalability: As businesses add more vendors and customers, the platform must remain scalable to accommodate growing databases while maintaining performance and user experience.

Trust and Transparency: Establishing trust between businesses by sharing KYC and compliance data requires precise control over what data is shared and with whom. Maintaining a balance between transparency and confidentiality is a challenge.

Multi-Business Support: Allowing users to manage multiple business entities and seamlessly switch between them adds complexity to user workflows and data organization. The system must be intuitive and allow for easy navigation without causing confusion or data overlap.

Subscription and Pricing Management: Operating on an annual subscription model brings challenges in managing payments, renewals, and service tier customization. It also requires robust customer support and communication to ensure that businesses remain engaged and willing to renew their subscriptions.

User Adoption and Onboarding: Educating businesses, especially those less tech-savvy, on how to use the platform effectively and integrate it into their existing workflows may require significant effort. This challenge can be addressed through intuitive UX design and comprehensive onboarding processes.

Research & Insights

1. Client Conversations:

Understanding Business Needs: After initial discussions with the client, it became clear that they needed a solution to streamline vendor and customer management, ensuring secure KYC compliance and transparency. The platform required features that could handle sensitive data and provide different permission levels for users.

Insight: The key focus was on building trust between businesses and their partners by providing transparent access to compliance and financial data, while maintaining data privacy.

2. Secondary Research Findings

Competitor Analysis: We analyzed existing platforms that provide similar KYC and compliance management solutions. This analysis helped identify common features like multi-business support, role-based permissions, and the ability to securely share vendor data.

Key Takeaways: Many competitors lacked flexibility in user roles and multi-business management. We aimed to fill this gap by offering a more customizable and robust role-based system. Research showed that businesses are increasingly prioritizing transparency in partnerships, with growing demand for solutions that integrate financial and compliance data.

3. UI Inspiration

Visual & UX Inspiration: We took inspiration from several well-designed platforms that handle complex data securely. These platforms featured intuitive dashboards, minimalistic design, and user-friendly flows, which you incorporated into the platform's UI.

Design Influence: Borrowing UI elements like clean dashboards, easy navigation, and clear call-to-actions helped you streamline the user experience, especially around critical actions like adding vendors or managing permissions.

4. Iterations Based on Feedback

Refining the User Experience: After initial design iterations, we received feedback from the client, leading to multiple refinements in the platform’s interface. These iterations focused on simplifying complex workflows, such as assigning roles or making the dashboard more simple & user friendly.

Result: Each iteration brought the design closer to an intuitive, user-friendly experience, improving both usability and the efficiency of core tasks like vendor onboarding.

Solution Overview

Onboarding

Onboarding is broken down into 3 steps

1. Signing Up: The sign-up process is divided into four steps: users enter their name, business name & PAN, and designation, then verify their mobile number via OTP, followed by email verification through OTP, and finally, they set a password for account login.

2. Subscription: After successfully completing the sign up users now has to Pay for the subscription if they want to register their business and use the platform.

User's Individual KYC will be integrated through a 3rd party platform and the Business KYC will be

there on the product itself after completing user's KYC

3. User's Individual & Business KYC verification: User has to verify both the KYC to get the full access to the product, User do have the choice to skip the business KYC for some time, but then they won't be able to register their business and get the full access to the platform.

Dashboard

All the users associated with the business can have access and summary of Customers, vendors and authorizations details directly at a single place.

All the sections of the dashboard will take the users to the relevant section with the filters applied after clicking.

Connected Businesses

Connected Businesses has a no. of features which helps the users managing their relations with vendors and customers.

Requesting Connection with Vendors and Customers & also requesting the mandatory and additional data that the user might requires
List of Vendors & Customers that are connected with their details and with option to see the complete details of the connected business if approved from their side.
List of sent requests to vendors and customers with an option to cancel the request or modify it.
The Details view page of any connected businesses- will show the KYC details, Financial statements and compliance history with options to disconnect the business, download reports, changing connection type and modifying data access restricted to different user roles.

There are total 7 type of Businesses that can be registered on the platform and the different type of businesses will have diff. type of details view page - Company, Partnership, Trust, Society, NGO, Self Proprietorship, LLP

Authorized Businesses

Authorized businesses is a list of Businesses that are added as a Vendor/Customer or both and has data accesses for the User’s business and their details. It also house the sent and rejected requests for connections and data accesses.

User can also modify/change the data accesses authorized previously directly through the side panel

My Businesses

My Businesses provide the user with the info about the businesses they are a part of and the businesses they have been requested to be a part of with any assigned user role, the list also give the access to see all the details of the businesses respectively to their roles assigned.

Any user can also register a new business if they want directly from the My Businesses screen with the same process continued from KYC.

User Management

User management will help managing all the users associated with a specific business with different and similar type user roles, giving all the information about the users in a tabular form, which will be easy to assess. and options to add new and edit existing users depending on their assigned role.

Any user can also register a new business if they want directly from the My Businesses screen with the same process continued from KYC.

Conclusion

This web application (Managing MSMEs) successfully tackled key challenges in managing vendor-customer relationships by offering a secure, scalable solution for handling KYC, compliance, and financial data. The user-friendly design, iterative improvements, and role-based access system make the platform an efficient tool for businesses to streamline operations, reduce risks, and build trust with partners.

My Learning

Iterative Design Process: The importance of an iterative approach became clear, as each cycle of feedback and refinement significantly improved the user experience.

Utilizing Feedback: Engaging with client feedback allowed me to identify pain points and adjust features accordingly, enhancing the overall effectiveness of the platform.

User-Centered Design: The project reinforced the value of user-centered design principles, highlighting the need to prioritize user needs and workflows throughout the development process.

Collaboration and Communication: I appreciated the significance of clear communication and collaboration with stakeholders, which was vital in aligning the design vision with business goals.

Complexity of the Product: I learned how some intricate features like managing KYC, compliance, and vendor relationships can be, requiring a careful balance of security, usability, and scalability.