Designing India’s First-Time Investor Experience
Fintech
D2C
App
0 to 1
The Context
A stealth mission to democratise wealth
In August 2017, Paytm quietly assembled a small team with one goal — build India's first truly simple, transparent, commission-free mutual fund investment platform.
The product bet was direct plans: no broker commissions, which meant investors kept 1–1.5% more in returns every year. On ₹1 lakh compounded over 10 years, that difference runs into tens of thousands of rupees. Meaningful money — but awareness of direct plans among retail investors was near zero.
I joined as the first and only designer. No design system, no prior research, no visual language to inherit. Just a brief, a product team, and a mission to democratise wealth.
The vision: Simpler. Transparent. Accessible. Three words that every design decision had to trace back to.
25M
Mutual fund investors in India at project start — less than 2% of the population. A massive, untapped market waiting for a better experience.
15.25%
Annual industry growth rate — 15.25% new investors were entering the mutual funds market every year.
The Problem
The opportunity wasn't a missing app.
It was a missing experience.
Mutual fund apps already existed—several of them. The problem was that every single one had been designed as if the user already wanted to invest — already trusted the category, already understood the terminology, already knew what a SIP was.
In reality, less than 2% of India's population invested in mutual funds. Not because people didn't have money or didn't want returns, but because the entire category felt like it wasn't built for them. Too complex. Too opaque. Too easy to get wrong.
The design challenge wasn't "make a better mutual fund app." It was: how do you design for someone who has never trusted a financial product, doesn't understand the jargon, and has been quietly losing money to hidden commissions for years without knowing it? That's a fundamentally different brief — and it required a fundamentally different approach to every screen.
What every existing app got wrong
📊 Designed for investors, not people becoming investors
🌀 Listed funds but never explained them — jargon everywhere, context nowhere
🫣 Hidden charges surfaced only after the transaction was complete
📝 KYC requiring printed forms, physical documents, and days of waiting
🤐 Complete silence after investing — no updates, no performance context, no support
None of these were technical failures. They were design failures — products built without ever asking who was actually on the other side of the screen.
My Role
The only designer in the room
Being the first and only designer doesn't mean doing everything alone — it means being the single person accountable for design quality across everything, while working closely with a product manager, engineers, and a strategy lead.
I owned the end-to-end design process: domain research, competitive analysis, user conversations, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design across all 20+ modules. There was no design brief handed to me — I wrote it alongside product. There was no design system to inherit — I built it from the first component.
Where I went beyond executing: I shaped the launch scope — which features made the cut and which were deferred — pushed back on deferring KYC with a research-backed argument, and made the case post-launch for reprioritising CAS portfolio import based on user feedback. These weren't product decisions I rubber-stamped. They were debates I drove.
UX Research
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Competitive Analysis
Card Sorting
User Personas
Design Strategy
The team grew after 6 months. The patterns, components, and documentation I built in the early days became the foundation the next designer inherited. That's a different kind of design leadership — building for a successor you haven't met yet.
Research Phase
Three months of research before a single screen was drawn
The research wasn't a formal process with neat phases — it was parallel, overlapping, and iterative. But it can be told in the order things built on each other: first understanding the domain, then experiencing the competition firsthand, then talking to real people, and finally running a focused exercise that answered one very specific design question.
Understanding the Domain
Becoming a student of the fintech
I'd never worked in fintech before. The first few weeks were spent becoming fluent in the language of mutual funds — not to become a financial expert, but to understand enough that I could spot where products were failing their users.
Mutual Fund Basics
I learned the key concepts behind mutual funds — NAV, fund types, SIP vs lump sum, direct vs regular plans, exit loads, and expense ratios. Understanding these helped decide what needed simplification or explanation in the product.
Direct vs Regular Plans
Regular plans include broker commissions (up to ~1.5% yearly), while direct plans remove this cost. Over time this creates meaningful savings. However, most Indian retail investors were unaware of this difference.
How Indians Invest
Most Indian investors trust familiar instruments like FDs, PPF, gold, and chit funds. Mutual funds are often perceived as risky. Designing the product therefore required building trust, not just simplifying investing.
Understanding the Domain
Experiencing the competition — as a user, and through 500+ of their users
After understanding the domain, I explored the existing landscape. I approached this in two ways: using competitor products myself and analysing feedback from their users.
Using the Apps Myself
I created real accounts on Fisdom, Kuvera, Scripbox, and Zerodha Coin. I went through KYC, explored funds, completed investments, and tried tracking portfolios. Scripbox felt curated and educational. Zerodha Coin felt built for experienced investors. Fisdom and Kuvera were functional but less reassuring for beginners.
Analyzing 500+ App Store Reviews
To understand broader user patterns, I worked with a developer to scrape 500–600 reviews from Google Play and the App Store across seven investing apps. I read each review and grouped feedback based on where users faced problems in the journey.
Deriving the User Journey
From the reviews, five stages of the investing journey emerged: Account Creation, Fund Research, Transact, Stay Invested, and Post Transaction. These stages helped map where users struggled across products and later shaped the structure of the Paytm Money experience.
Account Creation
Onboarding was complex and confusing.
Many platforms still required physical documents for KYC.
Users had no visibility into progress or remaining steps.
Separate logins were needed for different services.
Fund Research
Funds were listed but rarely explained.
Categories existed, but there was little context or guidance.
Educational content was mostly missing.
Only Scripbox offered meaningful editorial support.
Transact — Buy & Sell
SIP and lump sum flows worked but lacked clarity.
Most platforms only offered regular plans, charging hidden commissions.
Fund libraries were incomplete across many platforms.
Stay Invested
Portfolios only showed investments made on that platform.
NAV updates were often delayed or outdated.
No clear profit/loss tracking.
Limited ability to switch between funds.
Post Transaction
Customer support was weak across most platforms.
Little communication after investments were made.
No regular statements or performance updates.
No guidance during market changes.
The Ecosystem That Emerged
Over time, the design organization supported the creation of an interconnected product ecosystem:
A unified sales application managing the lead-to-disbursement lifecycle
Credit and underwriting systems improving evaluation speed and accuracy
Operations platforms supporting hundreds of branches
Horizontal platforms shared across more than thirty products
A customer application enabling direct loan journeys
Execution was driven by product designers across teams, but enabled by shared principles, systems, and governance.
Impact Beyond Screens
During this period, Piramal Finance grew from approximately ₹5,000 Cr to ₹75,000 Cr in assets under management.
Millions of users adopted digital products that previously did not exist within the organization. Loan processing volumes increased significantly, and operational workflows became faster and more predictable.
The most meaningful impact, however, was cultural.
Design moved from being absent to becoming part of how problems were framed. Product conversations began earlier. Experience considerations became part of business discussions.
The shift wasn’t just in interfaces — it was in decision-making.
What Changed for Me as a Leader
Building design at scale required a personal transition as well.
Early on, my value came from solving problems directly. Over time, the role shifted toward enabling others to solve them. Success became less about individual output and more about building systems, growing leaders, and creating alignment across teams.
The hardest lesson was learning that design maturity comes from distributed ownership, not centralized excellence.
What I Would Do Differently
If I were to start again, I would invest earlier in measurement infrastructure. For the first two years, success was visible but not always quantified. Embedding UX metrics and observability earlier would have accelerated adoption further.
I would also decentralize decision-making sooner. Strong ownership at the product level scales impact faster than centralized quality control.
Closing Thought
Building a design function isn’t a project with an end date. It’s continuous organizational work — balancing people, process, and product while adapting to the evolving needs of the business.
At Piramal Finance, design didn’t arrive fully formed.
It was built — one decision, one product, and one team at a time.
