As adoption increased across industries, the platform began to face performance and scalability challenges. The monolithic structure limited our ability to scale features, enhance user experience, and maintain optimal performance.
The Overview
The first iteration of SoftPAY launched with the right intentions: to simplify business payments and improve financial operations. However, as adoption grew, it became clear that users struggled to connect with the product experience. The interface felt dense, workflows were not intuitive, and essential actions like initiating payments, tracking transactions, or generating reports often felt more complex than they should.
During reviews and testing, users voiced frustrations about both the look and usability of the platform. While the system delivered value, the experience didn’t fully align with their expectations of speed and simplicity. Tasks that should have been quick and seamless instead felt repetitive and time-consuming.
To better understand these challenges, we gathered feedback from some of our key institutional users and finance teams after rollout:
01. Understanding the Challenge
SoftPay served a wide range of users across merchants, administrators, and support teams. Over time the platform grew into a monolithic system that became difficult to maintain and scale.
Key issues emerged as adoption increased. The system experienced slow response times, inconsistent performance, and occasional crashes. Every update required full system deployment, which introduced risks and slowed development. User journeys also became fragmented, making everyday tasks more complex than necessary.
It became clear that SoftPay needed more than a visual update. It required a complete rethink of its structure, performance, and user experience to meet the demands of modern financial operations.
02. The Transformation Direction
The new direction for SoftPay focused on building a modular and scalable platform that could support growth, stability, and long-term innovation. The goal was to create an infrastructure that is flexible and reliable while simplifying the experience for merchants and administrators.
Core areas of transformation included moving from a monolithic system to microservices, improving performance across all flows, and establishing a consistent product experience that supports enterprise-scale operations. This shift provides the foundation for faster updates, stronger resilience, and easier introduction of new features and market integrations.
03. The New Product Experience
The redesigned SoftPay introduces a more intuitive and efficient product experience across all modules. The focus is clarity, speed, and control, ensuring that users can complete critical financial tasks with confidence.
Dashboard
A refreshed overview that presents real-time insights on transactions, settlements, and system activity in a clear and consolidated layout.
- KYC Upload
A simplified and more transparent process for uploading, reviewing, and verifying KYC documents. Users now have clearer status indicators, better guidance, and a more streamlined flow that reduces errors and delays during onboarding.
- Accounts
Rebuilt as a unified financial workspace with two specialised sub-modules tailored for operational clarity and control.
- Mandate Accounts
A streamlined flow where users can view mandates, initiate approvals, review account instructions, and manage linked financial operations without unnecessary complexity.
- Virtual Accounts
Designed for speed and accuracy, this section enables users to create, track, and manage virtual accounts effortlessly. Filtering, tracking, and reconciliation now feel faster and more organized.
04. Outcomes and Future Direction
The transformation of SoftPay delivers significant improvements in stability, speed, and scalability. The new architecture supports continuous deployment, reduces downtime, and ensures higher reliability across all user operations.
05. Key Results
The transformation delivers measurable improvements in how SoftPAY performs, scales, and supports its users:
- Significantly faster response times
- Higher uptime and reduced service disruptions
- More efficient workflows for finance teams and merchants
- Stronger maintainability for future product growth
With its new architecture, SoftPAY is positioned to expand into new markets, integrate more financial services, and support enterprise-level operations with confidence. This redesign marks a major step in SoftAlliance’s commitment to building secure, efficient, future-ready financial solutions.
Each of these flows was shaped by the payment and financial processes we studied at various businesses and government agencies. By anchoring our design in real-world financial workflows, we created a system that feels familiar to users while remaining modern, intuitive, and effortless to navigate.
Contributors: Designer: Iretiayooluwa Wusu | Operations: Yeside Okelana | Product: Emmanuel Osungbohun | Engineering: Theophilus Ojochegbe Iyonor, Promise Okedele. Product Tests: Adeniyi Adunola
