UDAAN

Leading finance design for 1.5M+ businesses at Udaan

My role: Led design for Udaan’s finance and credit ecosystem. Built products across credit, GST, and working capital management (WCM).

1. CONTEXT & CHALLENGE

Turning accounting data into credit for businesses

Many large businesses on Udaan (₹50M+ revenue) used Tally for accounting. It was desktop only, complex, and reliant on accountants.



Udaan Capital, the company’s finance arm, wanted to use these accounting records to assess credit worthiness and convert such businesses into loan buyers.

After acquiring TimePay (“Tally on Mobile,” a product I had researched and redesigned in 2018-19), we integrated it as Working Capital Management (WCM) within Udaan Capital, with these goals:

  • Pull Tally data to assess credit risk and loan eligibility.

  • Let business owners track finances on mobile.

2. BUILDING THE MVP

Testing Tally connection and engagement

TimePay gave us a validated foundation. We built a quick mobile MVP for WCM to test if business owners would connect their Tally to our product and actively engage with it. It included:

  • A business dashboard with deep dives into sales, purchases, receivables, and payables, giving owners business stats on the go.

  • Team setup and collections management, so owners could invite employees to manage incoming payments (behaviour seen offline).

Instead of a surface level refresh, we interviewed marketers to understand the friction. We found:


  • A confusing blend of developer and marketer experiences

  • Missing campaign tools that blocked adoption

  • Restrictive exports

  • Credit based usage metrics instead of SaaS style plans

3. RESEARCH & INSIGHTS

How Indian business owners use tech

Field visits, weekly research calls, and analytics revealed:

Field visits, weekly research calls, and analytics revealed:

  • Low organic adoption
    Only 12% owners could set up WCM organically, without sales help. The Tally connect step felt heavy and required accountants’ help.

  • Business vocabulary
    Owners and employees preferred local business language over accounting terms (“follow-ups,” over reminders, “stock items” over “inventory”).

  • Image association
    Saw actions as objects: follow ups = WhatsApp message, invoices = PDFs.

  • Invoice sharing
    Owners shared invoices with customers directly from the app, bypassing accountants.

Field visits, weekly research calls, and analytics revealed:

  • Low organic adoption
    Only 12% owners could set up WCM organically, without sales help. The Tally connect step felt heavy and required accountants’ help.

  • Business vocabulary
    Owners and employees preferred local business language over accounting terms (“follow-ups,” over reminders, “stock items” over “inventory”).

  • Image association
    Saw actions as objects: follow ups = WhatsApp message, invoices = PDFs.

  • Invoice sharing
    Owners shared invoices with customers directly from the app, bypassing accountants.

  • Low organic adoption
    Only 12% owners could set up WCM organically, without sales help. The Tally connect step felt heavy and required accountants’ help.

  • Business vocabulary
    Owners and employees preferred local business language over accounting terms (“follow-ups,” over reminders, “stock items” over “inventory”).

  • Image association
    Saw actions as objects: follow ups = WhatsApp message, invoices = PDFs.

  • Invoice sharing
    Owners shared invoices with customers directly from the app, bypassing accountants.

4. ITERATION & RESULTS

Driving organic adoption and making it familiar for daily use

We used these insights to to test solutions, and over time, added them to the product roadmap.

  • Driving organic setup (12 to 33%)
    Added a demo dashboard showing dummy data to prove clear value before setup. Also added step-by-step onboarding with videos and WhatsApp prompts shareable with accountants.

  • Boosting invoice sharing (24 to 32%)
    Surfaced Share Invoice in the natural flow with in-app nudges.

  • Aligning to familiar behaviour
    Replaced technical terms with business vocabulary. Updated visual language and iconography for recognition.

5. SCALING DESIGN

Building Udaan Capital’s own system

Udaan lacked a formal system; scaling was inconsistent.
I initiated and built a component library tailored to finance products, improving consistency and delivery speed across the finance suite.

5. LEADING FINANCE DESIGN

From WCM to the full portfolio

As WCM matured, I took ownership of the broader finance portfolio, accompanied by a junior designer.

  • Credit: Redesigned credit line flows within Udaan’s main e-commerce app (1.5M+ users), powering 30% payments with strict compliance.

  • BizNumbers: Launched a GST tracking app that scaled to 50K businesses.

  • Working capital management: Scaled from 500 to 3K businesses, several converted to loan buyers through offline sales channels.

Designing financial tools for Indian SMBs meant designing for trust, habit, and familiarity.
By anchoring experiences in the language and tools they already used, we made finance approachable, data accessible, and engagement measurable.

Fin