Most financial services platforms in South Africa are designed for a customer who does not exist: someone calm, patient, and reading every line of text. In practice, customers are under pressure, distracted, and managing finances that are already stretched thin. When the design assumes a luxury that people do not have, a platform produces exactly the outcomes regulators warn about and the costs land somewhere.
This is the problem my team and I were brought in to solve on a recent engagement with EmpowerFS, a South African financial services provider. What follows is what we found, what we changed, and what we believe product teams, compliance specialists and fellow designers should take from it.
An Impossible Journey
Like many financial services portals, EmpowerFS’s online customer interface felt somewhat like an internal admin tool. Customers working through applications for credit life insurance, funeral cover and loan consolidation were asked to complete a journey of up to 32 steps.
Each step has a regulatory reason to exist, but presented back-to-back, the process asked more of a customer than most people can reasonably give. A user experience – or UX as it is called today – that is not simple and easy creates predictable results: users are worn down and begin clicking “next” just to finish. Someone clicking blindly through disclosures is not really understanding or agreeing to anything, which means a process that exists to protect the customer, and the company, was quietly failing at its purpose.
What We Changed – and Did Not
Working with the EmpowerFS team, we broke the single journey into several smaller, more focused flows. Depending on the path taken, the process was shortened by between 34% and 53%.
In a regulated environment, that raises an obvious question: what gets left out? The answer is nothing.
The mandatory disclosures, the record of advice, the terms a client must actively accept, the proof that cover is underwritten by a licensed insurer – all remained to protect the client-. What changed was where and how it showed up. We simply repositioned each requirement at the exact point where it is relevant and therefore likely to be read and understood.
What Designers, Product Teams and Compliance Specialists Should Ask
Three questions changed the way we approached this challenge:
- Where does the customer actually lose patience? Map the journey step by step and watch real users complete it. Every step the customer skips blindly is a step where comprehension fails.
- Is each disclosure doing its job? Test comprehension at the point of disclosure, not after the fact. If a customer cannot recall agreeing to terms they clicked past, the disclosure has not happened in any meaningful sense.
- What would success look like as things not happening? Fewer abandoned applications, fewer errors, fewer complaints, fewer support calls. Great UX in regulated industries shows up as the confusion that did not occur and the mistakes nobody made.
Measure What Matters
For regulators, the framing that matters is the Financial Sector Conduct Authority’s outcomes-based Treating Customers Fairly approach. TCF is not about checking boxes; it is about whether customers experience fair outcomes. Journey design is where that user experience is made or broken. A customer who cannot complete an application, or who agrees to something they do not understand, is not being treated fairly no matter what the paperwork says.
Where post-launch data is available, measure abandonment rates, completion errors, comprehension testing results, complaint volumes and support call patterns. These are the metrics that tell you whether the journey actually earned a customer’s trust.
Trust Is the Measure
I no longer pitch UX design as “human-centred” or “empathy”. The terms are overused and sound like a nice-to-have. In financial services, UX is a risk factor, and it has tangible costs. A confused customer drops off mid-process, phones the call centre, complains, or signs something they did not understand and disputes it later. Each of those outcomes costs money, creates compliance exposure, and erodes the trust customers invest in the organisation.
The real measure of success is not a redesigned interface. It is a customer who understood what they signed, and trusted the organisation enough to sign it.
