Wallet Genie
The payment solution is at the heart of Yieldstreet, serving as the critical link between investors and their investments. Faced with challenges from our current KYC and payments provider, Synapse, we needed a way to effectively communicate the switch to a new banking provider and guide our investors through the migration process from Synapse to Plaid. This required transitioning all investors to the new systems within a very tight deadline.
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01
Objective
Our objective was to efficiently migrate our current investors to the new KYC and payment providers while ensuring they had sufficient information to maintain their trust. Additionally, we needed to update our new user onboarding flow to integrate the new providers seamlessly.
02
Challenge
To swiftly implement the new provider, we needed to leverage our existing component library and minimize the creation of new components to avoid expanding the project's scope and duration. This required delivering an optimal user experience using our current components without compromising user satisfaction.
Additionally, transitioning to the new provider necessitated the removal of our wallet feature, which the new Plaid doesn’t support. The wallet was a crucial aspect of our platform, allowing Yieldstreet to pay investment distributions to investors' wallets, who could then withdraw or reinvest these funds. This change prompted several communication challenges:
How might we notify investors about the removal of the wallet feature?
How might we inform investors with funds in their wallets about the removal process and ensure they receive their money?
How might we communicate the new method for paying investment distributions once the wallet is no longer available?
Addressing these questions effectively was essential to maintaining investor trust and ensuring a smooth transition.
03
Solution
New Investor Onboarding
Implementing Plaid into our onboarding flow was straightforward, as new users did not have existing funds on our platform and did not need to be informed of the changes. The updates to our onboarding process involved removing the previous KYC and bank linking steps and replacing them with a single screen to collect user consent for sharing their data with our new providers. After providing consent, users are redirected to Plaid to complete the KYC process and link a bank account, enabling them to start investing on Yieldstreet.
Migrating Current Investors
Current investors could only make new investments once they reactivated their accounts by completing the KYC process and linking a default bank account with Plaid. To facilitate this, we created two migration flows: one for single-account investors and one for multiple-account investors. The primary difference between these flows was the messaging displayed in the login modal. Single-account users only needed to migrate one account, while multiple-account investors had to migrate each of their accounts individually, depending on the type, by going through the process for each account separately.
As investors begin the migration process, they are directed to our consent screen. After providing consent, they proceed to Plaid to complete the KYC process and link a bank account.
Replacing the wallet
With the removal of the wallet feature, new and migrating investors are now required to select a default bank account for receiving distributions. By default, the first bank linked is automatically set as the default. To choose a new default bank, investors must link an additional bank account (up to three accounts allowed) and designate their preferred account for receiving distributions. To support these changes, updates were made to the bank account section, including the addition of a "Default" tag and a "Change Default Bank" feature.
04
Result
Following the transition, Yieldstreet began to see promising results and successfully retained trust among active investors on the platform. Within one month of implementing the changes, we observed the following outcomes:
Investor Migration with active investments:
Eligible Investors: 20,633
Migrated Investors: 7,961
Conversion Rate: 38.6%
Number of Investments:
Eligible: 182,884
Migrated: 120,225
Conversion Rate: 65.7%
Investment Amount
Eligible: $3.716B
Migrated: $2.627B
Conversion Rate: 71.0%