Summary of my work at Kikin

Here's a quick overview of my work at Kikin over the past 1.5 years. I’ve highlighted the main things I worked on as a Product Designer, without getting into too much detail about the design process.

Within 1.5 years, we’ve created a comprehensive system that allows users to onboard their companies, get a credit assessment and funding, finance their invoices, schedule repayments, and track those repayments.

If you're interested to see how I approach specific design problems, check out this case study →

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What Kikin does

It's is a B2B supplier invoice payment service tailored for small to mid-sized businesses. During a production cycle, there is typically a lag time of 2-4 months between when businesses pay in full for the production of goods to suppliers and when they sell the goods and receive revenue. This delay often results in a drop in cash flow and leaves their balance empty. Invoice financing through Kikin helps these businesses stabilize their cash flow, allowing them to spend more on marketing or other priorities.

Kikin offers invoice funding at a flat fee and collaborates exclusively with sustainable businesses (e.g. B-corp certified). The greater your business's sustainability, the larger the discount you receive on the flat fee.

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Process

I joined Kikin at an early stage. My worked covered the full design cycle of a beta product in collaboration with the product manager and developers

Our method early on was grounded in conversations with potential clients. We talked with business founders and  sought to understand their financial aspirations and insecurities. This informed our design and communication strategy, making it more empathetic and transparent. Here are some of the insights we discovered when talking to SME business founders:

• Founders use funds from VC capital and angel investors but often try to avoid this to retain equity. Usually, it's very hard to find resources otherwise, because verification procedures are lengthy.
• They are willing to provide the necessary financial information about their company but also expect transparency in return – no hidden costs, notifications about upcoming repayments, etc.
• When making business decisions, they heavily rely on advice from their network of entrepreneurs.
• They would, by all means, prefer an automated process for funding, avoiding the need to speak directly with people.

Requirements and goals

It was obvious that users would receive the app’s value once they got their credit line and got their first invoice paid. We wanted to streamline the onboarding as much as possible, but we needed to gather some essential information first in order to provide users with a credit line.

We made a list of a bare minimum we needed to be able to make a business assessment:

• Business registered name, name of the director
• Access to the business financial bank account and accounting software – linked to our system through a third-party service
• Given our strong commitment to sustainable business, we also checked ESG accreditations of a company, as we only want to work with sustainable businesses

We divided the onboarding into three easy steps, aiming for simplicity to set us apart from conventional loan tools. I designed the questionnaire to be engaging and informative about why we were asking for sensitive data.

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1. Adding company details

2. Sharing ESG accreditations

Adding ESG certificates gives users a discount on the fee. After user testing, we made this step optional, as it’s not crucial to access credit line.

3. Adding financial accounts

Sharing financial data is sensitive, so we've ensured users know their data is secure and protected.

Post-onboarding

The next thing is how we present the results of the calculations in a way that would not confuse users and would motivate them to add their first invoice straight away.

Another peculiarity of our model is that right after being onboarded, for the first 72 hours the user has 2 credit limits: one is an instant unconditional limit that we’re sure we’re ready to lend (can be really low for some businesses) The second is a potential limit, which our system calculates based on various factors but requires human verification.

We’ve made many iterations and a lot of testing of the dashboard as we were figuring out how to communicate the funding terms.

One key takeaway is that, although the system cannot provide a final credit limit immediately after registration, we display two limits until the company account is manually reviewed:

• Instant Limit: A lower amount that we can lend immediately after the automated assessment.
• Potential Limit: A much higher amount that the user can access right away, but approval for this limit will take up to 72 hours.

Once the review is completed, these two limits merge into one.

This approach allows customers to upload invoices higher than their instant limit without delay. And we take our time to review the company and, if necessary, request additional bank statement and other financial docs. Over time, our system has become more accurate in automatically determining credit amounts.

Adding invoices

• I designed a 3-step flow and worked through all scenarios, iteratively finding a way to clearly communicate the fee structure
• Added flows for payments to foreign suppliers and payments in foreign currencies, including conversion rates and transfer fees
• Incorporated a supplier verification system for faster payments to verified suppliers
• Created a direct sync feature for Xero users, allowing them to import invoices directly from Xero with pre-filled data.

Tracking payments

After the payment is scheduled, the main task for users is to be aware of when their instalments will be charged from their account. To minimise effort, we designed email reminders that are sent if there are payments due in the next 7 days.

Additionally, users can see all upcoming payments on the dashboard. where  By clicking to expand, users can view payments split by months.We also introduced a cash flow graph, which is particularly helpful for users with multiple invoices extended simultaneously, making it easier to see totals due in a particular week.

For a closer look at the details of a specific invoice, the invoices page is the best option. It allows users to track the current status of an invoice, see how much has already been paid back, what is due when, and more.

Inviting other users

This feature was quite complex and required extensive work on user flows for different persona types.

To ensure that only authorized individuals can create loans, we developed a flow for granting Power of Attorney.