Designing a Bulk Payouts Feature

Some Flutterwave customers have to make several bank payouts to multiple accounts, especially when paying wages. Human errors tend to happen due to the repetitiveness of this process, which ruins the payout experience for our customers. This case study discusses how we designed a payout feature that enables customers to simultaneously make bank payouts to 5,000 different accounts. Presently, this feature makes up an average of 56% of our total payouts in a month.

About the Project 

One major challenge our customers faced was the repetitive, error-prone process of making multiple bank payouts. The goal was to design a scalable, seamless bulk transfer feature that could handle thousands of payouts simultaneously while minimizing errors and giving users complete control throughout.

Problem Discovery

The problem discovery first came about through feedback from customers on issues they encountered while making bank transfers. As this feedback increased, we conducted user interviews with some customers to better understand what they were experiencing.

The findings from the user interviews conducted, combined with data from MixPanel, showed that a majority of these issues were human errors. These errors mainly occurred during the repetitive process of making a second or third bank transfer payment.

Further observations on how customers were making bank transfers showed that more customers immediately made a second transfer right after completing the first one. That made us start exploring how to enable our customers to make more than one bank transfer at a time sooner than later.

Research Exploration

Based on the user interviews conducted, I researched how customers were making bank transfers in various currencies. I carried out test bank transfers in multiple currencies to better understand how each country processes transfers. I investigated different edge cases and scenarios that might cause bank transfers to fail, along with how to resolve them.

User Flow Map

My design process started with a user flow map categorized into three stages: preparation, review, and post-operation. This categorisation enabled me to help prioritise user needs according to what was most important during each phase.

Design Approach

My primary focus was to make it easier for merchants to complete bulk transfers with as few distractions as possible. Some critical influencing factors were:

1. Merchants should be able to return to the bulk transfer page and continue from wherever they left off.

2. The general transfer experience should be straightforward and not deviate much from the current single transfer flow.

3. Putting merchants in control at every step with edit and delete options for the uploaded transfers.

Some Critical Parts of my Solution

01 - Flexible File Upload: CSV being a well-established text file format, making it a flexible option for uploading files. It also allowed merchants to upload as many as 5,000 transfers through a single file.

02 - Error Management: An obvious way of identifying and managing errors such that it results in positive feedback or action.

03 - Full Access and Control: We ensured our customers had total control at every step with full access to manage the uploaded transfers. They could also replace the uploaded CSV file.

Final Solution

My primary design focus was to simplify the merchants' process to complete their bulk transfers with as few distractions as possible.

Results 🚀

Engineering Constraints and Edge Cases

We encountered some edge cases that we had to solve, which were not factored in initially while working on this project. These include:

• The preview page took too long to validate and poll, depending on the number of uploads.

• The possible duplicate tag was not clear enough to customers.

• Users could not exit the dashboard and still return to see the uploaded file in some browsers.

• Users could not select another balance to debit for the transfer besides their default balance.

• CSV file upload was not apparent that it queues the uploads, especially for large files.

Next Steps

• Reusing a bulk transfer that has been completed instead of starting a new one every time.

• Starting a bulk transfer and saving it as a draft to be completed at a later time.