Rebrand and upgrade the existing digital wallet for PayZapp to Zapp Account
Zapp Account is a digital prepaid payments account offered by HDFC Bank through PayZapp, built to give users a more capable, controlled, and convenient way to pay, transact, and manage everyday spends. It supports UPI, Tap and Pay, Peer to Peer, Peer to Merchant, Bank Transfers and Online Payments using a Virtual Card.
Brand the PayZapp Wallet as Zapp Account, introduce Video KYC, and create entry points that could promote it across the app.
Before Zapp Account, the product existed as PayZapp Wallet.
In its most complete form, it could support a wider set of payment actions. But most users only operated with MinKYC: the minimum verification needed to use PayZapp itself which offered limited options.
A significant share of users weren’t accessing the full PayZapp Wallet. HDFC Bank customers could unlock it with a simple 4‑digit card verification, while non‑bank customers remained restricted. The bank sought to reposition the Wallet as a discretionary digital payments account and strengthen its role within the PayZapp ecosystem. This requirement translated into two key actions: enabling non‑bank customers to access full capabilities and rebranding the Wallet as Zapp Account.
The most immediate ask was Video KYC. Until then, non-bank customers did not have a way to the full capabilities of Zapp Account. Bank customers could complete 4 digit card verification and unlock the complete experience, but everyone else was limited. Video KYC would change that by giving non-bank users a route to full access and made the product more open to the wider market.
This initiative involved rebranding PayZapp Wallet to Zapp Account within the app. The scope covered updates to icons, nomenclature, and user nudges previously used for Wallet education and promotion. At a broader level, it was about shaping the product experience -delivering a cohesive rebrand while working within limited development bandwidth.
Increase wallet loads, improve adoption, and elevate the overall experience.
We were focusing on 3 core outcomes with Zapp Account:
Adoption meant getting more people to enroll for Zapp Account in the first place. This became especially important because a large share of PayZapp users were new-to-bank or non-bank customers. With Video KYC, those users could now become eligible for the full Zapp Account experience. The opportunity was no longer limited to the existing bank customer base; we had to make the value proposition clear enough for this wider audience to sign up: speed, convenience, and security in one payment account.
Auto Load was one of the clearest ways to make Zapp Account more convenient and habit-forming. If users enabled it, they did not have to think about topping up the wallet each time they wanted to pay. It also became a strong signal that they intended to keep using Zapp Account and take fuller advantage of it as an everyday payments account.
The experience also needed to do a better job of selling and explaining the product inside PayZapp. The rebrand gave us room to refresh the visual language, make the landing page more load-centric, and improve how important features like auto load showed up. We also wanted clearer communication through nudges and progress states, so users could understand what Zapp Account offered, what they had already unlocked, and what they could do next. These were not just business targets; they came from our discussions with leadership about what Zapp Account needed to become.
Study what we already knew, some competitor research and design with independent rollouts in mind
We believed Zapp Account was ideal for users managing everyday fixed and discretionary spends—especially those with predictable monthly income and routine spending patterns. Positioned as a capable secondary payments account, it made day‑to‑day money movement easier to track by separating spends from the primary bank account. Being able to use UPI was at the core of this experience, enabling the account to deliver on its intended role. The bank also viewed it as a low‑barrier acquisition tool, drawing users into deeper financial relationships through a product they could use every day.
We looked at the most prominent payment apps, that offered a digital wallet or were a digital wallet, to understand what they were prioritizing in this space: how they introduced wallet-like accounts, how onboarding was structured, how Min KYC and full KYC states were handled, and which actions they made easiest to discover from the first few screens.
The clearest pattern was that wallets were not treating full KYC as a compliance step alone. They were using benefits, limits, and access to better wallet features as the reason to complete it. We were also trying to understand things like how the long KYC journey was framed, what skipping the flow led to, and how users were given a reason to resume later and finish the upgrade. Across most competitors, the most prominent action was still add money. The landing pages were designed to make loading the wallet feel quick, obvious, and possible in very few taps.
From existing data and market research shared by the bank, we knew that a large share of the PayZapp user base was between 25-40 years old and came from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Within that group, salaried users had the strongest use case for Zapp Account, and this was a direction the bank believed in as well. Since PayZapp Wallet adoption was still limited, the immediate adoption goal was to lean toward a user profile that closely represented existing PayZapp users who had not meaningfully adopted the wallet so far.
From the existing PayZapp Wallet usage data, we could see that most activity was concentrated around bills and recharges, largely because those were the easiest and most visible ways to use the wallet. Auto-load feature adoption was especially lower. That mattered because auto-load could drive more convenient usage and higher or more frequent load amounts, both of which were important goals for Zapp Account.
A few observations from the PayZapp wallet users we interviewed:
For most users, the wallet was primarily a cashpoint conversion tool - cashpoints earned on offers were added as wallet balance and spent on recharges and bill payments.
Several wallet capabilities were less known, including Swipe to Pay (Pin-Less), Tap and Pay and the benefits users could unlock with a full KYC.
Auto-load was largely unknown, but the problem it solves - running out of balance mid-payment - was something people had experienced and found frustrating.
Based on all of our findings, we defined four Key Experience Drivers that would allow us to create a product that we wanted.
We wanted our communication strategy to revolve around three core values, leveraging Zapp Account's capabilities to reinforce them across entry points and onboarding surfaces:
Video KYC could easily become a drop-off-heavy journey because it involved many steps. Users would need to share personal and PAN details, pay an applicable upgrade fee, prepare documents, ensure proper lighting, maintain a stable internet connection, complete the video verification, wait for the verification to go through, and then receive the upgraded Zapp Account. We decided to approach it as a clear timeline: break the journey into simple, one-step-at-a-time milestones, show what was done and what came next, and let users resume from the last completed step wherever the flow allowed it. Leaving the journey was not something we wanted to highlight, but it still needed to feel like a clear option rather than lost progress.
The older PayZapp Wallet landing page did not really push loading money as the hero action. It focused more heavily on the virtual card as many wallet capabilities could still be used contextually inside PayZapp payment flows, where users could simply choose PayZapp Wallet as the payment source. But that approach did not work as well for the positioning Zapp Account was trying to take. Since adoption was tied to monthly load amounts, and frequency of loads, making loading more prominent became a natural product decision. The first screen had to make balance the hero account state and Load Money the hero action. Users should be able to spot how much money they had, understand whether it was enough for upcoming payments, and notice cues like low balance before they ran into a payment failure. Most competitors also leaned towards a similar approach.
Education emerged as a consistent gap -users didn’t fully understand what Zapp Account offered, what they had already unlocked, or what actions could move them forward. Our focus was to address this without relying too much on banners, tooltips, or separate screens that most users would skip. Instead, we aimed to organize the experience around contextual levers, embedding guidance directly into the flow/action points so communication felt natural.
We’ll follow a non-bank PayZapp user’s path to unlocking the full capabilities of Zapp Account, while unpacking the design decisions behind each step.
To explain the solution clearly, we’ll follow the journey of a non-bank PayZapp user trying to unlock the full capabilities of Zapp Account.
This path lets us move screen by screen while also unpacking the design decisions behind each step: where the user first encounters Zapp Account, how the value is explained, what moves them toward Video KYC, and how the product helps them understand progress until the account is fully unlocked.
Before we dive into the actual flows, here is what helped me close the designs faster.
I built two Figma plugins during this project - Figma Recall and Fair Colors. Fair Colors let you define local, meaningful names for colors while keeping them tied to the core design system, making aliases easy to swap and hand off to developers. Figma Recall let me manage iterations without crowding the canvas, and made it easy to pull up past versions during stakeholder meetings without digging through file history.
We experimented with a few color directions, but the blueish primary theme with green accents was the clearest fit - partly because it sat naturally within PayZapp's existing color scheme and design system, without needing to fight against it. Green came in specifically for badges, nudges, and anywhere the UI needed to surface a value or highlight an action. The broader direction was pastel: soft, easy on the eye, nothing too loud. We weren't trying to stand out through contrast or bold color; we wanted the interface to feel calm and trustworthy, in a way that still felt at home inside PayZapp. Spacing and corner radii weren't something we had to experiment with much - those were inherited from PayZapp's existing design system.
Users had to encounter Zapp Account at moments where the value made sense inside PayZapp, instead of depending on a single education page. These entry points helped introduce the account from familiar surfaces before asking users to continue into the full-KYC journey.
The entry points pique the user’s interest, and the user taps one of them to begin enrolling for Zapp Account.
Once users showed interest, the product had to explain why full KYC mattered and what they needed to do next without making the journey feel heavier than necessary.
Once the verification is confirmed, the user taps to complete the upgrade and step into the full account experience.
Back button in the KYC flow acted like the Skip button as we wanted to avoid a dedicated 'Skip' button which would feel naturally inviting.
With the account fully unlocked, the user moves on to the final recap of the journey.
VKYC is handled by IDFy
After the recap, the user moves on to the next placeholder section.
Placeholder copy for another section of the journey. Update this with the real narrative once the screen is ready.
Zapp account was displayed across different surfaces within PayZapp contextually
Double-digit month-on-month growth in spends and loads, ~20% of wallet loaders on Auto-Load, and a climb into the top 5 digital wallet accounts in the industry
The revised experience helped make Zapp Account easier to understand, easier to enter, and easier to use as a place to load and spend money inside PayZapp.
Out of the many different directions that we explored, these were a few interesting ones that I would like to feature.
We explored this approach parallely but decided not to go ahead with it.
Here communication would take the front seat. Instead of naming what each part of the account did, every surface would lead with the value someone was already getting from it. The focus settled on three things: speed, convenience, and rewards.
In practice that meant surfacing what a user had already saved or earned. The passbook could tell you how many statement entries you had avoided. Rewards could show how many cashbacks you had collected across the lifetime of the account. We also looked at badges that would attach an adjective to each anchor icon, so Scan and Pay would carry a “superfast” badge rather than just a label.
What it came down to was cognitive load. Fusing value into the anchor icons would have meant simple, everyday actions having to be read and decoded rather than simply recognised, and people are already wired to scan for the plain thing they came for. Someone looking for their passbook is looking for the word passbook as opposed to count of the entries they saved.
It can be a secondary surface shot, but the key actions have to be very clear. We weren’t really keen on creating dedicated extra surfaces just to convey values.
Below are a few of the iterations we tried for a communication-led Zapp Account home page.
The three approaches that follow are the ones we were leaning towards the most, and the ones we planned to take to the bank as where Zapp Account could go next. They all circle the same question, of how the account could help someone stay on top of what they spend, and they arrived in this order: each one came out of what the previous one taught us.
This approach assumed a salaried user with a predictable monthly income, split across discretionary and non-discretionary spends. It would let people set their own monthly budget and track it against a meter, nudging them as they neared the line and calling it out once they crossed it.
Working through it surfaced something we kept running into. A budget almost always resolves into a negative moment, because most people do spend past the number they set, which would mean the product delivering bad news on a schedule. It is also counterintuitive for a spending account to discourage spending: we wanted Zapp Account to assist rather than to police anyone’s habits.
We did not throw the approach away for that. The observation was useful in itself, and it pointed at what to try next: keep the visibility a budget gives someone, and drop the verdict attached to it. That is what led to the next approach.
So this approach dropped the target entirely. Instead of asking someone to commit to a number, it would show them their own numbers: what they usually spend across a month, how the current month sits against that average, and what is still due to go out. The detail would populate itself from their spending patterns rather than from a setup screen, so there would be nothing to configure and nothing to fall behind on.
The value would move from restraint to understanding. Paying through Zapp Account would become worth doing because the account could tell you where your money actually went, which is something a bank statement technically holds but never makes readable. Nothing here would pass judgement either: the same overspend a budget would have flagged as a failure would simply read as information.
Tags were the other half of it. We looked at grouping spends into categories a person would actually recognise, a commute or a canteen rather than an industry code, and at how much of that could be inferred automatically. Anything needing manual upkeep tends to be abandoned by the second month, so automating the tagging mattered more than offering it.
The last of these borrowed from Revolut. Rather than one balance doing everything, money would actually move into separate pockets and stay there, held out of the spendable balance until the plan it belonged to needed it. Each pocket would stand for something specific. We were calling them Plans.
They would come in two forms. Monthly plans would activate on their own every month and hold what someone routinely needs, covering the non-discretionary commitments like rent and bills as well as the discretionary spending they still want room for. Alongside those, dedicated plans could be created for a particular need over a particular stretch of time: a trip later in the year, something being saved up for, anything with its own start and finish.
What appealed to us was that a plan would carry the structure of a budget without the scorekeeping. Because the money genuinely leaves the spendable balance, the commitment would hold on its own and there would be nothing to enforce afterwards: a plan is a decision made once, in advance, when someone is thinking clearly, rather than a limit that reports back on them at the end of the month. It would also stretch across both short-term and long-term saving, so the same mechanism could serve a monthly rhythm and a year-long goal.
