Zilch acquisition funnel optimisation
Zilch is a UK-based buy now, pay later platform serving more than five million customers, enabling them to spread the cost of purchases across interest-free instalments.
I was the lead designer in the Growth and Acquisition team, working closely with a product manager, engineers and a data analyst. I also collaborated with the Decisioning, Marketing and KYC teams on areas of the onboarding journey that crossed team boundaries.
Our objective was to increase the number of customers reaching their first spend by identifying and fixing the biggest points of friction in the acquisition funnel. Alongside the funnel improvements, I helped bring the new Zilch brand into the product while raising the overall quality and consistency of the whole app experience.
Scope
Collaboration
Growth, Marketing, Decisioning, CRM and Delivery teams
Platform
Native App and Web
THE OPPORTUNITY
The funnel treated people who'd applied before, changed their details or returned later as brand new customers. As a result, many motivated customers failed long before reaching their first spend.
REPRIORITISING THE ROADMAP
By challenging the existing roadmap through customer data, behavioural analysis and competitor research, I helped steer the team towards higher-impact opportunities.
Rather than immediately redesigning the experience, I reviewed customer behaviour, security-related friction and the competitive landscape to understand where we could create the greatest value. The evidence suggested our biggest opportunity wasn't acquiring more traffic, but helping motivated customers successfully complete the journey.
Working closely with Product, Engineering and Growth, I used these insights to influence the roadmap. We shifted our focus from feature parity and acquisition towards reducing friction, while identifying an opportunity to move customers into the app earlier. This reduced duplicated engineering effort, strengthened security and created a stronger long-term product strategy.
RESEARCH
Before proposing solutions, I wanted to understand where customers were dropping off and why. I analysed the end-to-end journey using behavioural data, customer feedback, competitor research and a UX audit to prioritise the highest-impact opportunities.
I started at the top of the funnel, where credential stuffing and fraud attempts had the biggest impact, before working through each stage of the journey to first spend.
MAIN FINDINGS
The research revealed three recurring failures responsible for most onboarding drop-offs. These became the focus of the work that followed.
BEYOND THE BRIEF
While working on the acquisition funnel, I regularly identified opportunities beyond my team's roadmap. Rather than documenting them, I partnered with other teams to build the case, align stakeholders and help turn them into initiatives.
VISION · FUTURE ONBOARDING
Introduced a notification centre to improve engagement
Scoped, aligned stakeholders and delivered a new notification centre to improve customer engagement and campaign effectiveness.
OPERATIONS · COMMS AUDIT
Created the first complete audit of customer communications
Mapped every customer message across teams, removing duplication and giving Marketing and our team a shared reference for future initiatives.
IDV PROVIDER · ONFIDO
Escalated a recurring IDV failure pattern to Onfido
Identified that poor lighting sent 24% of applicants to manual review and partnered with Onfido to explore improvements.
EXPERIMENTATION
While larger funnel improvements required significant engineering effort, I used targeted experiments to validate assumptions, reduce delivery risk and generate immediate business value.
AREA 1 OF 3 · ACCOUNT CREATION
30% of phone numbers were already linked to another account, causing OTP verification to silently fail. By collecting email first, we could recognise existing customers immediately, route them correctly and avoid unnecessary authentication failures.
I also partnered closely with backend engineers to ensure the solution remained secure.
Reliable account recovery
If a phone number was linked to another account, users were told clearly and given a path to their existing account.
Early account recognition
Existing accounts detected at step one rather than being checked in the middle of the flow. Returning users routed to login and verified before hitting any dead ends.
Device-aware experience
Trusted devices get a streamlined login. New devices get full verification once, then trusted from that point forward.
AREA 2 OF 3 · PLATFORM STRATEGY
The original roadmap focused on achieving full web/app parity. After analysing the market and our own product, I challenged that direction and proposed treating web as an entry point instead. By moving customers into the app earlier via a QR code, we could reduce engineering effort, improve security and eliminate long-term parity debt.
Web as entry point, not product
Users get a compelling prompt to continue on app via QR code rather than a degraded web experience.
Cleaner security posture
Removing web sign-ups eliminated the credential stuffing attack surface that had been a persistent vulnerability.
Parity debt gone
One codebase, one journey. Every future improvement applied everywhere rather than being built twice.
AREA 3 OF 3 · FIXING TASK COMPLETION RATE
40% of customers who signed the credit agreement never completed identity verification. While their application was being reviewed, they landed in a storefront they couldn't use with little explanation. I redesigned the pending experience, moved key notifications earlier in the journey and repositioned the credit agreement after ID verification to create a clearer path to completion.
"Your credit limit is waiting"
Users who returned after dropping off IDV were met with a targeted screen. Those past the expiry window had their application reset cleanly.
Clear pending state
Users knew exactly where they were and what to expect, instead of landing in a shopfront they couldn't use.
Only commit after verification
M1 status only set after full completion. No more phantom M1s from users who signed the agreement but never finished IDV.
OUTCOMES
Every conversion gain came from removing friction, not increasing acquisition spend.
WHAT I LEARNED
