Making
managment
easy for African
entrepreneur

Nomba — Simple payment
and management solution
for businesses

Kudi, a Nigerian-based agent banking company, made a decision to rebrand and introduce a new business model that includes a product aimed at helping business owners track their payments, growth, outlets, and more across Africa.

As a Product Designer, I joined forces with another product designer based in Berlin, Germany, to collaborate and work closely with FourthCanvas's Brand team to create their new product in line with the company's new brand identity.

See Project

Role

User Experience Designer,
Interaction designer

Company

Nomba

Industry

Payments

Other Collaborators

Aluko Ayomiposi

Fourthcanvas

Getting Started — Defining the Problem

SMEs in Nigeria make up a significant portion of the economy, contributing 48% to the national GDP, accounting for 96% of businesses, and providing 84% of employment. However, despite their important role, SMEs still face challenges that hinder their growth and development. One of these challenges is managing financial transactions and team operations.

Kudi, one of Africa's leading Fintech companies, has developed a new product called Nomba that aims to address these issues by providing solutions for payment processing, financial management, and team organization for businesses of all sizes. With Nomba, business owners can easily track both incoming and outgoing payments while also managing their teams and outlets.

Across Africa, businesses are required to leverage various technologies, such as mobile or web applications, to effectively manage and monitor their operations. This entails utilizing payment apps for sending and receiving payments, distinct apps for monitoring various business outlets or stores, and yet another app for managing team members and their payroll.

Asking Important Questions — Market Research and Insights

To begin, we delved into market research to gain insights into the challenges faced by entrepreneurs. By conducting targeted surveys for entrepreneurs, we were able to identify three specific business owners with whom we had a call. This call helped us gain valuable information on what we wanted to Focus on for this MVP.

Notes from Stakeholders — Understanding the business objective & Impact

We wanted to ensure we were meeting the perfect objective already set by the stakeholders, these objectives are:

— To reach the OKR set for the new year (2022)
— Product that provides business visibility
— Integration of Kudi's Point of sale system into the new model

Some other feedback we got from the stakeholders are:

Ideating — Our Solution

We built a unique ecosystem of products and services with trusted software,payments, and hardware solution for businesses of all sizes. Now small businesses andlarge enterprises across Africa can access Kudi's innovative ecosystem with the toolsthey need to start, run, grow, and adapt their businesses.

With this, merchants can runtheir entire business end-to-end with our integrated software, hardware, and dataanalytics, while making it easier for them to take card and other means of payments.

Key Drivers

Kudi Point of sale payments software and hardware to suit any business

Withour point of sale software products and our payment terminals offering businessesfully integrated POS software, reliable and secure payments acceptance, and onetransparent processing rate of x % for all card transactions. The systems aredesigned for you and your employees to get started quickly.

Kudi Banking

A fair, accessible financial services that connect directly with our sellers’ payments, helping them unlock instant access to their sales, automate their savings, and receive personalized financing offerings. Kudi Banking consists of three core products designed to help small business owners confidently manage cash flow stress: Kudi Savings, Kudi Checking and Kudi Loans. By offering essential banking tools that work seamlessly with Kudi's ecosystem of solutions like payments, Kudi Invoice and Kudi Payroll, sellers now have a single home for their entire business, gaining a unified view of their payments, account balances, expenditures, and financing options.

Kudi Robust business tools to power operations

Kudi manages the behind-the-scenes details, giving time back to merchants to focus on running their business. Tools such as Team managment, Customer directory, Outlet managment, invoices, payrolls, etc.

African businesses can now sell online, in-person with Nomba's integrated suite of products

User Persona

After understanding the types of users and stakeholders which is differentiated by roles and permission, we then had to focus on the group that made up the majority user base which are the business owners, the persona below was created based on the research. We also ensured other types of users such as individuals in an organizations with diferent permissions are not left out.

Moving Forward

We then proceded to drawing he user flow the information achitechture on a white boarding tool.

User Flow

To ensure smooth functioning of a complex system involving multiple users with different permissions, it was important to establish a comprehensive user flow to establish a seamless workflow that seamlessly transitions from one feature of the product to the next.

Nomba Design system

Understanding the complexity of the product, we needed a system with a very simple navigation. Also taking into account the main feature and the product solution. One of the main focus was to build a very scalable system, this way it'll be very easy for any other future add-ons and enable the product to achieve it's business objective while providing the solution for the user.

We started first with building the style guide such as colour system, typography system, and spacing system which will then influence the components to be used on the app.