Evolving the POS machine for bank transfers
Figma
Lottie
Adobe Creative Suite
HTML/CSS
Javascript
Over the past five years, the Central Bank of Nigeria has been pushing for a cashless economy—a daunting task for a country where commerce heavily relied on cash transactions. Unlike many other countries, interbank transfers in Nigeria are (almost) instant, quickly becoming the preferred payment method in stores, even surpassing debit cards.
This shift, however, brought about a new challenge. When a customer made a bank transfer at checkout, it often took several minutes for the payment to be confirmed. The attendant would typically have to check with the manager to verify if they had received payment confirmation. This resulted in longer checkout times and awkward moments at the till.
At PiggyVest, we came up with an idea to solve this problem. What if we could create a POS machine with virtual account numbers for customers to make bank transfers to? That's exactly what we built—the first of its kind, which has now become an industry standard in Nigeria.
A customer makes a bank transfer to the account number displayed on the screen. The POS machine then automatically confirms the transfer and instantly prints a receipt. I was tasked with the end-to-end design of the entire experience. This involved conducting interviews with merchants and their staff, designing interfaces for POS machines, collaborating with overseas suppliers on hardware, and creating dashboards for merchants to manage transactions and their POS machines.
The main challenge was designing an interface that shop attendants could use intuitively with little to no training. This meant the UI had to be simple and familiar—anyone who could operate a phone should be able to use the POS machine. We successfully achieved this goal.
Other Work
