Virgo — KYC & Liveness Verification
Rebuilding KYC and identity verification for a digital wallet: verification success up 80% and an onboarding flow that finally feels human.
01Impact first
Identity checks were the single biggest drop-off point in Virgo's digital wallet onboarding. After we rebuilt the KYC and liveness detection flow, verification success rose 80% and user trust scores climbed with it. The same flow became one of the pillars behind Virgo's Google Play Best of 2022 award.
02The problem
Every new account had to pass one test: prove there's a real person behind the phone, not a photo of a photo. The flow kept failing honest users instead. Masks and hats dropped face-match accuracy to 70-79%. Instruction screens were unclear and inconsistent, so people didn't know what went wrong or how to retry. And with pandemic-era remote onboarding, every failed identity verification was a customer we might never see again.
03What I led
As design lead, I owned the end-to-end strategy: competitive benchmarking of GoPay, OVO, DANA, LinkAja, and ShopeePay, the decision to adopt a streamlined 3-step KYC flow (eKTP scan, liveness check, confirmation), and a redesign of every instruction screen with clear do and don't illustrations, revised color use, and proper system feedback.
The key trade-off: in phase 2, we removed the selfie step entirely and moved to an AAI stack (OCR, liveness detection, face match, Privy integration). Fewer steps for users, higher integrity for compliance.
04Validation
We tested with 33 participants on a Maze prototype across four missions:
· 81.8% followed the expected flow path without help
· 25 of 28 understood the instruction pages, in about 7 seconds of reading time
· Users preferred the design variant that felt more responsive
· Accessibility feedback, like users wearing glasses, went straight into the next iteration's backlog
05Reflection
A liveness check isn't a technical checkpoint. It's the moment a user quietly asks, "Will I be accepted?" Grounding every decision in benchmarks and real user feedback made Virgo's KYC onboarding feel faster, safer, and more human.
Let's build something that moves the numbers.
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