How to increase loan applications & conversion rate

Getting a personal loan process

Navi is an 🇮🇳Indian fintech super-app with Cash loans, Investments, UPI Payments, Insurance and many more. As of 2024, it has $100 million in revenue with $10 million in profit.

Navi is an Indian fintech Super-app with Cash Loan, Investments, UPI Payments, Insurance and many more. As of 2024 it has $100 million in revenue with $10 million in profit.

Navi is an 🇮🇳Indian fintech super-app with Cash loans, Investments, UPI Payments, Insurance and many more. As of 2024, it has $100 million in revenue with $10 million in profit.

Project overview

What

This project highlights how design helped to offer an intuitive loan application experience and increase the top of the funnel and overall loan disbursal rate.

My role

Sole product design, Strategy, and User testing.

Collaboration with

Product managers, Software developers, UX researcher

BACKSTORY

Why we are re-designing?

Navi have onboarded more co-lending companies which gives us a substantially higher capital to give out loans.

Here along with marketing and sales campaigns, product can help optimise these numbers. This product played an instrumental role in getting more leads and further optimising the loan application funnel.

problem statement

What can be improved?

Only a 30% conversion rate on the same day of initiation. The reason varies in process to process and it is being discussed in the respective flows below. However some of the generic problems are...

Understandability issues

Trust issues

Practicality issues

If 100 people have started the loan application process today(assuming these people got an offer and Navi will eventually disburse the loan), only 30% are able complete the entire process by today itself. All the rest will disburse the loan within 60 days.

Problem discovery methods

Quantitative data

Deep learning of current metrics & hypothesis

Screen recordings

Watch how user interact and validate hypothesis

Customer calling

Users perspective and pain points

What do we want to achieve?

1

Increase impression/day for the loans page

2

Increase loan application rate

4

Repeat loan applications

3

Application conversion rate

The vision

The vision was to learn from quick experimentation and rapid testing with users to offer the best seamless digital loan process experience to them.

Rapid testing

Quick optimising

Who should care?

Our primary customer base has the same needs as this persona

Reside in India 2 & 3 cities

Earns 25k - 35k/mo

Hello! I am Mukesh

I am 28 years old, a cook at a restaurant.

I live in Bhagalpur district and I earn around ₹25k per month.

Why personal loan?

I need to renovate my house and need ₹1 Lakh. I will check

Hassle-free process
Digital & instant disbursal
Trustable company
Lower interest rate

I need to renovate my house and need ₹1 Lakh. I will check

Hassle-free process

Digital & instant disbursal

Trustable company

Lower interest rate

I need to renovate my house and need ₹1 Lakh. I will check

Hassle-free process
Digital & instant disbursal
Trustable company
Lower interest rate

Loan application process

Basic details

Work details

Loan offer

Bank verification

User verification (KYC)

Loan disbursal

1/4

How to increase impressions per day

We introduced an entirely new real estate to pitch Loans. Core job of this loans tab is to give insights of loans and convince user to choose Navi.

Old placement- Product grid

New entry point

New loans tab

What if users get to see a loan page instead of starting the process of loan application directly? The core JTBD of this page is to inform the user about:

Loan application details

Unique offerings

Social proof

Why Navi?

The core USPs - Zero processing fee, foreclosure charges (rarely competitors provide) and instant disbursal (mostly competitors provide)

Effortlessness

Since Mukesh is not very well versed in English, the thumb rule is to convey things most simply.

Social proof

Trust building and social proofing a very important factors as personal loan products lack word-of-mouth

Secondary product

Home Loan diversify the lending business and should be considered as a secondary product in this tab.

Masthead states

Application progress

2/4

How to approve more application

loan offer funnel optimisation

Loans tab

Basic & work details

Loan offer

The problem statement

90% of our application gets rejected because of weak credit score, despite having good financial habits. Collecting and analysing their bank statements will help us optimise the decision making process.

Only 10% application gets loan offer

Existing flow

Work details

Loan offer

Application rejected

Low CIBIL

The new flow

Work details

Loan offer

Bank statement

Application rejected

Partially rejected

How do we fetch the bank statement

Intregation of third party account aggregator helped us to fetched users’ bank statement with ease

What

27 banks

How

Only OTP required

What

250 banks

How

PDF upload

Challenges in user experience

To reach more audience we onboarded 2 account aggregators (They create a bridge to get bank statement and sells SDK to others) and one required OTP and another PDF upload to get this data. PDF upload is such a tideos process and user might drop off

PDF upload is tideous

User might drop off

How to reach more audience in an effective way

To minimise the drop-off, we created the flow in three layers. Since entering OTP is more convenient we kept those sets of banks in the first layer.

1st list of banks

Only OTP required

2nd list of banks

PDF upload

3rd list of banks

Application reject (but collect data - bank name)

1st Funnel - powered by Finvu

Low CIBIL

OTP required

2nd Funnel - powered by Finbox

Low CIBIL

Can’t find your bank in the first page

Bank statement PDF upload

3rd Funnel - Shown all Indian banks

excluding Finvu & Finbox

Low CIBIL

Can’t find your bank even in the second page

Loan rejection

But why can’t all the banks be on the same screen?

Schedule a meeting and let me answer all your questions

3/4

How to reduce the drop off rate on bank verification process

Optimising bank verification

The Problem

Users have to manually type out all the bank details followed by penny drop process. The existing drop-off rate was 45%.

Opportunity - Verify bank via UPI

'Reverse penny drop' allows users to verify their bank more effortlessly than ever. Pay ₹1(refundable) via UPI and we will get all the bank details to verify your bank

Why drop off rate was still 40%

As this is a new process and users have to pay money instead of receiving money, people misunderstand it with some kind of fraud.
The success rate of verification is lower than the “using account number” process (existing)

As this is a new process and users have to pay money instead of receiving money, people misunderstand it with some kind of fraud.
The success rate of verification is lower than the “using account number” process (existing)

Existing

NEW

Solving for trust

Distrust comes from non-familiar things. Here users’ concern would be, “I am here to receive money why should I send ₹1?”.

How we addressed this issue?