MoMo Business Web.
A unified web platform for SMEs, wholesalers, and service partners across Africa.
- Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Platform
- Web · SaaS
- Markets
- 7 · EN + FR
- Segment
- SME · Wholesaler · Partner
About
The web half of the MoMo Business family — deeper admin, operational, and API capabilities for SMEs and partners.
MoMo Business is a B2C/B2B fintech suite under the MoMo umbrella. The web portal serves the SME, wholesaler, and service-partner segments — complementing the mobile app with deeper administrative, operational, and API capabilities.
The brief: consolidate fragmented tools into one SaaS platform that works across seven markets and two languages, and carries the operational weight the counter-side app can't.
The mobile app is the counter. The web portal is where the business is run.
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 business.
Constraints
- 7 markets
- 2 languages (EN · FR)
- Regulated KYC per country
- SME → partner segments
Features were fragmented across USSD, a mobile app, and a web portal — SMEs, wholesalers, and partners switching platforms to complete a single operational task. Onboarding was paper-based and slow, the ageing stack timed out under real load, and competitors were winning on features MoMo didn't yet offer.
For businesses actually run on the portal, that fragmentation wasn't friction — it was a reason to leave. The portal had to carry the operational weight (bulk payments, approvals, APIs) while still reading as one coherent product.
Process
A double-diamond, applied iteratively across markets and segments — not a single linear run.
- 01
Discover
- 02
Research
- 03
Strategy
- 04
Ideate
- 05
Prototype
- 06
Validate
- 07
Delivery
Phase two · The people
Three operators, three jobs.
Personas drawn from primary research across the SME, wholesaler, and partner segments. They shaped the portal's information architecture, feature priorities, and developer experience.
Awa
Small-business owner
Runs a growing SME. Accepts payments, manages inventory, pays suppliers, and tracks daily transactions across the business.
What she needs
Fast, reliable payment processing and strong oversight of vendor and customer transactions — all in one place.
Koffi
Multi-account operator
Manages multiple accounts. Sends bulk payments and receives large transfers, and grows a wholesale network across regions.
What he needs
Streamlined bulk transactions and easy reconciliation for cash flow, with secure large transfers.
Adjoua
Developer · integrator
Integrates digital payments into her own platform. Needs reliable, well-documented APIs for payments, invoices, and wallet management.
What she needs
Efficient, scalable, clearly documented APIs she can implement fast — to serve her own clients well.
Together they span the operator-to-partner range. Every major flow — and every API — runs past all three.
Phase three · Key problems
The four that mattered.
- 01
Problem
Manual onboarding
Onboarding was paper-based, requiring branch visits. Account activation often stretched into months.
Solution
Digital onboarding
We digitised the whole flow. KYC documents captured, uploaded, and reviewed in-portal — onboarding time dropped by 85%, and customer acquisition followed.
- 02
Problem
Channel fragmentation
Features were split across USSD, mobile, and web — users switching between three platforms to complete simple tasks.
Solution
One product
MoMo Business consolidates everything the target segment needs into one unified web platform. Businesses run end-to-end without switching channels.
- 03
Problem
Poor platform performance
Interviews surfaced frequent time-outs, instability, and failed transactions — traced to an outdated tech stack.
Solution
Modern tech stack
Rebuilt from the ground up on cloud infrastructure in place of in-country servers. Crashes dropped to near zero and stability became invisible — the way it should be.
- 04
Problem
Missing competitive features
Users were migrating to alternative products that offered functionality MoMo didn't yet have.
Solution
Gap closure & innovation
Competitor analysis and user feedback prioritised the essential features for launch, then shipped enhancements on a bi-monthly cadence.
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 portal shares the same atomic design system as the mobile app and partner integrations — atoms through pages — so the whole family stays coherent across seven markets and two languages, without the visual language drifting between surfaces.
- Shared atomic foundation across mobile, web, and partner integrations.
- Web-specific patterns for dense tables, bulk actions, and multi-step approvals.
- 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.
Dashboard — main account, tills, and sub-accounts in one view, with quick access to the actions that matter most.
Invest in the system early, and design for the operator and the partner equally — a platform this large only holds together at scale.
— What I learned
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