Reducing Abandonment, Growing Revenue

The Problem Had a Price Tag

The Brief

We needed to build a registration experience so frictionless that customers would actually finish it. That meant a mobile and web application capable of pre-populating application fields from minimal input, for example, scanning a driver’s license with a phone camera to auto-fill most of the form.

The application also had to:

• Present a polished, white-labelable interface adaptable to each retail brand
• Support multiple data-collection workflows with brand-specific customization
• Handle high traffic volume across several major brands simultaneously
• Ship on an aggressive timeline

What We Were Up Against

Three obstacles shaped our approach from the start.

Every additional keystroke increases the chance a customer walks away. Long forms and dense legal copy aren’t just annoying. They’re conversion killers. We treated keystroke reduction as a primary design constraint, not a nice-to-have.

The technology capable of saving those keystrokes also carries a performance cost. Extracting structured data from a photo of a driver’s license can take up to 10 seconds. A 10-second wait on a retail floor is nearly as damaging as a long form. Speed and capability had to coexist.

And the application needed to support interchangeable data-collection workflows, each with its own logic and edge cases, without becoming brittle or hard to extend.

How We Solved It

Through user research and iterative design, we mapped flows that addressed all three constraints simultaneously. The architecture was built so that any data-collection strategy could be swapped in or out cleanly, loading behavior was handled in a way that masked latency, and the interface kept users moving without unnecessary friction.

For the technology stack, we chose Rails to build a clean API quickly freeing the team to focus effort where it mattered most. We used React with Redux for the client layer. That combination let us move fast without sacrificing the extensibility the platform would need as it scaled across brands.

From Proof of Concept to Enterprise Platform

We launched with a single retail brand as the test case. Application abandonment dropped 87%. One store signed 30 new accounts in a single day, while dramatically reducing the time each application took to complete.

That result wasn’t the finish line. It was the proof of concept.

With the impact demonstrated, we scaled the platform across the entire business. New data-collection strategies were added. Additional retail brands came online. What had started as a fix for a stubborn conversion problem became infrastructure the business depends on.

For a company whose entire model is built on acquiring cardholders at scale on behalf of retail partners, improving registration completion rates moves revenue directly. The platform we built is now strategically vital to how they operate and grow.