Cutting company registration from weeks of paperwork to hours

What applicants wanted most was to know where they stood.

There was no product manager, so I owned product strategy and design from a blank page to live in one month. The client is one of the UK's largest company-formation agents, with over one million companies formed. It registers companies for direct clients and partner businesses, and the same portal also runs white-labelled under other companies' brands, serving their customers as their own product. I defined the three account types this needed, and three separate flows looked like the obvious build. Three flows would mean three copies of the compliance rules, drifting apart every time the regulation changes. The rules are heavy: anti-money-laundering law, Companies House requirements and GDPR. Every applicant clears identity and KYC checks. Companies bring directors and beneficial owners, each verified in turn, and a banned country or a forged document has to stop the application cold.

I decided: one system. One system was the harder build and the right one. One adaptive portal proves the rules once, against a single rulebook compliance can certify, and asks each applicant only what their case needs. The build cost is paid once. Drift would have cost at every regulation change, forever. The recommendation was mine. The CTO and Managing Director backed it, and the CEO signed it off.

The portal works out the account type at the start, then everything after it adapts. Identity verification runs through an external provider, embedded so it never reads as a handoff: I agreed the outputs with them and designed the closing screen around it, everything ticked, application complete. A PIN login for white-label partners, whose own customers need secure access without ever seeing the platform underneath. The partners themselves get a dashboard: every customer account, its compliance status, invites sent and tracked, all under their own branding.

1Carol onboards herself

Each director verifies their own identity while the applicant keeps their place

A company has directors, and each has to be verified. The portal lets the applicant bring the others in and keep their place.

2Carol invites Andrew

Invite a colleague

I mapped the end-to-end journey and ran A/B tests. Three pain points came up every time. Applicants did not know which documents to submit, could not see their status, and waited days with no estimate.

The design showed the state everywhere. Guidance at each step, errors caught as you type in plain language, and live status with notifications in place of the email chase. In testing, more applicants finished when problems surfaced at entry.

Registration dropped from one to three weeks to 2 to 24 hours, and support calls fell by 71%. The 14 people who had handled email by hand moved on to reviewing complete applications. The business could grow without hiring for it.

The design system and style guide the build ran on were mine. The solutions architect drew the backend schema from my user-flow maps. I presented the finished product to the board myself, and left behind documentation, the design system and a trained successor designer.

Three account types made three separate flows look like the obvious build. One adaptive system with one compliance rulebook was a product strategy call as much as a design one, and the recommendation was mine. The build cost was paid once, and every regulation change lands in a single rulebook.