"The NSE's own strategy document admits their brand is perceived as elitist. I wanted to answer the question buried inside that admission."
UX DesignProduct DesignPrototypingStrategy
Role
UX/UI Design, Prototyping
Year
2025
Tools
Figma, React, Vite
Deliverable
Live prototype
NSE Onboarding
A self-initiated onboarding experience for the Nairobi Securities Exchange. Turning a dense corporate strategy document into a flow a first-time investor could actually complete.
Live prototype
Built in React and Vite. Open it on your phone.
The brief
Reading a strategy doc as a design brief.
The NSE's 2025-2029 strategy document admits something striking: their brand is perceived as elitist, and local retail investor participation has been falling for a decade. Their most ambitious goal, 9 million active retail investors by 2029, depends entirely on fixing that. Nobody commissioned this. I wanted to answer a question the strategy document couldn't: what would it actually feel like to sign up?
"The brand is perceived as elitist. It does not appeal to the retail investor who believes it is complicated to invest."
NSE Strategy 2025-2029
The tension
Regulatory weight. Human-scale experience.
Onboarding for a regulated financial institution can't be stripped bare. Compliance requirements are real. The challenge is making a necessarily thorough process feel light and trustworthy. Not a compliance gauntlet. The design had to carry the weight of an institution while feeling native to a phone, for someone who has never bought a share before.
The layer most people miss
Onboarding as strategic intelligence.
Personalisation in onboarding isn't just good UX. In the context of the NSE's strategy, it's an intelligence layer. Every answer a user gives during signup is a signal: where they're based, how much they're looking to invest, what they're saving toward. The NSE plans to deploy 500 agents across every county. For that to work at scale, they need to know where their investors actually sit. Designed well, onboarding surfaces exactly that, and turns a necessary friction point into the most strategically valuable touchpoint the exchange has. If all the NSE's Direct Market Access platforms can be personalised based on the intelligence gathered during onboarding, the experience becomes more than just a signup flow. It becomes a first step toward building a relationship with an investor who might have been excluded from financial markets for too long.
The work
A snapshot of the onboarding flow. Click to explore.
What I'd push further
Usability testing with actual first-time investors, not assumptions about them. Of course, a tighter look at what happens after signup: does the first dashboard follow through on the promise the onboarding made? Good onboarding is a two-way value exchange. The user gets clarity and access. The exchange gets the intelligence to serve them better over time. Ultimately building a fully fledged, well informed investor platform is the real goal. Onboarding is just the first step toward that. But it's a critical one. If it doesn't work, nothing else does.
Live prototype
Open in your browser →