Traditional credit card systems created friction across both sides of the transaction. Businesses bore high interchange fees, challenging PCI compliance requirments, hand high chargeback fraud. Customers faced clunky checkout flows and limited transparency.

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• Merchants: Struggled with high costs of credit card processing, slow settlements, and fraudulent chargebacks
  
  
• Customers: Wanted a seamless, mobile-first way to pay in-store or online where traditional credit cards are not accepted.
  
  
• Internal ops teams: Needed oversight into merchant risk, customized onboarding flows, fraud monitoring, and automated settlement flows.

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The dual challenge was to improve the merchant economics and financial tools while keeping the customer experience frictionless.

Designing outside of card rails introduced risks beyond usability — partnerships, compliance, and trust were critical.

• Banking dependency: Loss of sponsor bank forced us to pause merchant app rollout.
  
  
• Compliance demands: Onboarding merchants required KYB, and customers needed identity verification for KYC.
  
  
• Hardware alternatives: mPOS had to replicate terminal reliability with only mobile devices.
  
  
• Customer adoption risk: Without existing habits, the app had to be simple enough to drive usage from first payment.
  
  
• Start-up uncertainty: Lean resources and shifting priorities meant constant scope trade-offs.
  

Balancing these risks required pragmatic prioritization — focusing on flows that could deliver merchant and customer value quickly while building trust in the system.

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We focused on building a unified experience for both merchants and customers, reducing reliance on traditional payment rails and creating a clean, modern alternative.

• Designed merchant mPOS app with tap-to-pay and QR acceptance to replace card terminals.
  
  
• Created NanoKard customer app for mobile in-store payments and frictionless online checkout.
  
  
• Conducted usability testing with SMB merchants to refine onboarding and payment flows.
  
  
• Partnered with compliance to make KYC/KYB steps modular, ensuring speed for low-risk users and rigor for high-risk merchants.
  
  
• Built shared design tokens/system across apps for consistency and faster iteration.
  
  
• Embedded real-time transaction visibility into both merchant and customer apps for trust and transparency.
  
  

By taking a parallel B2B2C approach, we designed a full payments ecosystem where both sides of the transaction benefited.

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Critical design decisions defined whether NanoKard could compete with card systems in usability and trust.

• mPOS without terminals: Chose tap-to-pay and QR code as the core merchant acceptance modes, eliminating card readers.
  
  
• Dual-sided onboarding: Built flows that verified both customers and merchants under one shared system.
  
  
• Friction vs. compliance: Designed tiered verification to optimize onboarding speed for low-risk users.
  
  
• Cross-platform consistency: Codified design tokens to unify merchant and customer apps.
  
  
• Backoffice integration: Embedded compliance monitoring directly into flows to reduce risk escalations.
  
  

These choices gave the platform a realistic chance of competing with entrenched card networks by offering both economic advantage and user simplicity..

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While full merchant launch was blocked, significant progress was made in shaping a scalable payments ecosystem.

• mPOS merchant app prototyped and validated with pilot merchants.
  
  
• Customer NanoKard app designed and tested for in-store and online checkout.
  
  
• Backoffice tools launched to support compliance, risk, and settlement operations.
  
  
• Unified design system established across apps, enabling faster design/engineering velocity.
  
  

Had rollout continued, next steps included merchant pilot expansion, marketing to drive customer adoption, and scaling mPOS acceptance across verticals.

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