Chase Media Solutions

The Challenge

Chase's merchant services platform required new business owners to complete a lengthy, multi-step application to begin accepting payments. The existing flow had a 52% abandonment rate — merchants were dropping off before submitting their application, costing the business millions in unrealized revenue.

Discovery

We conducted contextual inquiry sessions with 20 small business owners going through the onboarding process. We shadowed customer support agents handling onboarding calls and analyzed drop-off analytics across every step of the funnel.

Key findings:

• Information overload — the application asked for 47 fields upfront, many of which weren't needed until later stages
• No save and return — merchants who stepped away lost all progress
• Unclear requirements — business owners didn't know which documents they needed before starting, leading to mid-flow abandonment

"I had to stop halfway through because I didn't have my EIN number. When I came back, I had to start over." — Restaurant owner, Brooklyn

Framing the Strategy

We reframed onboarding from a single application to a progressive enrollment journey. The goal was to get merchants accepting their first payment as fast as possible, then collect remaining information over time.

Design principles:

• Start accepting, then complete — let merchants begin processing with minimal information
• Smart defaults — pre-fill everything we can from business registration data
• Transparent progress — always show what's done, what's next, and what's optional

The Solution

Progressive Application

We broke the monolithic form into three tiers: essentials (5 fields to start processing), recommended (unlock full features), and optional (compliance and optimization). Merchants could begin accepting payments after completing just the essentials.

Intelligent Document Capture

We built a document scanning flow that uses OCR to extract business information from uploaded documents, pre-filling form fields and reducing manual entry by 70%.

Persistent State + Reminders

Every field auto-saves. Merchants receive contextual email reminders about incomplete sections, with deep links back to exactly where they left off.

Results

Reflection

The biggest insight was that onboarding is not a gate — it's a gradient. By letting merchants start generating revenue immediately, we aligned the business incentive (more merchants processing) with the user need (start accepting payments today). The compliance requirements didn't go away — they just moved to the right moment.