MoMo Business.
One mobile-first product for merchants across seven African markets.
- Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Platform
- iOS · Android
- Markets
- 7 · EN + FR
- Segment
- Nano · micro merchants
About
A product suite under the MoMo umbrella — part of MTN's mission to power the continent's financial growth.
MoMo Business is a B2C/B2B fintech product for the nano and micro merchant segments — a secure, reliable, feature-rich platform that lets small businesses take payments, pay suppliers, and scale with ease.
The brief: consolidate fragmented merchant tools into one mobile-first product that works across seven markets, two languages, and a wide spectrum of business sizes — without compromising security, compliance, or speed.
Three channels, seven markets, two languages. One product had to hold all of it.
Outcomes · Post-launch
Aggregate across the seven markets, twelve months after launch.
100M+
Annual revenue uplift
Aggregate across seven African markets — not per market.
1.1M+
Monthly transactions
Aggregate across seven markets, post-launch.
24,320
New customers / month
Aggregate across seven markets.
−85%
Onboarding time
+27%
User retention
+9.8%
Market share
−63%
Performance issues
Secondary metrics across web platform and mobile app, post-launch.
Phase one · The brief
Three channels, one merchant.
Constraints
- 7 markets
- 2 languages (EN · FR)
- Regulated KYC per country
- Nano → micro segments
Merchants were splitting the same job across USSD, a web portal, and a mobile app. A cash-in in the morning, a supplier payment at lunch, a reconciliation in the evening — three tools, three mental models, three failure modes.
The consolidation wasn't cosmetic. Each market had its own regulator, its own KYC requirements, its own competitive threat. The product had to look like one thing to the merchant, and hold up under seven sets of conditions behind the scenes.
Process
A double-diamond, applied iteratively per market — not a single linear run.
- 01
Discover
- 02
Research
- 03
Strategy
- 04
Ideate
- 05
Prototype
- 06
Validate
- 07
Delivery
Phase two · The people
Three merchants, three jobs.
Personas drawn from primary research across the nano and micro segments. They shaped every major product decision — from onboarding depth to the number of taps it takes to accept a payment.
Kwame
Delivery courier · Motorcycle
Delivers groceries and goods by motorcycle. Needs to accept payment at the door, in seconds, on a bike.
What he needs
Fast transaction processing. Reliable payment confirmation. A running total he can trust at the end of the day.
Abena
Fresh produce stall
Runs a street-market stall selling fruit and produce. Accepts payments, pays suppliers, tracks transactions on one device.
What she needs
One-handed, glove-free operation. Zero-friction confirmation. Supplier payouts without a second app.
Efua
Corner shop · Two employees
Owns a corner shop with two till employees. Accepts payments, pays suppliers, and runs payroll from the app.
What she needs
Multiple tills. Employee-level verification before goods leave the counter. Salaries paid without leaving the product.
Together they span the nano-to-micro range. Every major flow runs past all three — if any of them can't complete it cleanly, the flow gets revisited.
Phase three · Key problems
The four that mattered.
- 01
Problem
Manual onboarding
Onboarding was paper-based. Users travelled to a branch to sign up, and activation stretched into weeks or months.
Solution
Digital onboarding
We digitised the whole flow. KYC documents captured, uploaded, and reviewed in-app — onboarding time dropped by 85%, and customer acquisition followed.
- 02
Problem
Channel fragmentation
Critical features were split across USSD, mobile, and web — forcing merchants to switch platforms to finish even simple tasks.
Solution
One product
MoMo Business consolidates everything the target segment needs into a single mobile product. One mental model, one home screen, one job at a time.
- 03
Problem
Poor app performance
Interviews surfaced constant crashes, instability, and failed transactions — rooted in an outdated stack and in-country servers.
Solution
Modern tech stack
Rebuilt from the ground up on cloud services in place of in-country servers. Crashes dropped to near zero, and the day-to-day feel finally matched the brand promise.
- 04
Problem
Missing competitive features
Competitor analysis surfaced gaps that were pushing daily-active users to alternative products.
Solution
Gap closure & innovation
Prioritised the essential features for launch, then shipped enhancements on a bi-monthly cadence — with user feedback driving the roadmap.
Phase four · How I used AI
AI ran through the work, not on top of it.
Market research
Synthesised regulatory, competitive, and consumer-behaviour data across seven markets in a fraction of the time desk research would take. Kept the strategy grounded in region-specific insight, not generic fintech assumptions.
Persona development
Pressure-tested and refined personas — challenging assumptions, surfacing edge cases, stress-testing motivations against the research base. Sharper, more defensible personas that held up under scrutiny.
Design system, in Figma
Worked with AI directly inside Figma to accelerate the system build — generating components, variants, and token structures collaboratively. Weeks of solo system work compressed into days, without sacrificing rigour.
Localisation & FR translation
In-context French localisation directly in Figma — aware of West and Central African French variants, not European French. Multi-market rollout became faster and more culturally accurate.
Phase five · System & features
A shared foundation across the family.
Foundations
- Tokens
- Atoms
- Molecules
- Organisms
- Templates · Pages
The mobile app shares the same atomic design system as the broader product family — atoms through pages — with mobile-specific variants layered on top. The shared foundation drove rapid iteration across seven markets and two languages, without the visual language drifting between mobile and web.
- Shared atomic foundation with MoMo Business web — atoms through pages.
- Mobile-specific variants for touch targets, gestures, one-handed reach.
- Tokenised colour, type, and spacing for multi-brand support across the group.
- Localisation-ready components designed for English and French variants.
- Built collaboratively in Figma, with AI accelerating component generation.
Phase six · Selected screens
Selected screens.
The key surfaces at a glance.
Log in — PIN or biometric entry, with account switching for merchants running more than one business.
Invest in the system early — onboarding, tokens, localisation — and the rest of the product gets easier to ship and scale.
— What I learned
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