Moving M-PESA Statement Verification Out of the Branch

A self-serve verification flow for 50M+ users, including a USSD path for feature phones, that removed tens of thousands of branch visits a day.

Role

Senior Product Designer

Industry

Fintech

Year

3 Months

Context

Replacing an in-person verification process with a self-serve flow for M-PESA's 50 million-plus users, built to work whether or not someone owns a smartphone.

Problem

M-PESA statements needed to be verified in person. A customer who needed to prove a transaction, for a loan application, a dispute, a legal matter, had to physically visit a Customer Experience Centre, wait in a queue, and have staff confirm it manually. At the scale M-PESA operates, that meant thousands of people a day standing in branches for something a phone should have been able to do, and a manual process sitting between a customer and their own financial record was also a slower, less consistent way to catch fraud than a system built to check for it automatically.

Context

Replacing an in-person verification process with a self-serve flow for M-PESA's 50 million-plus users, built to work whether or not someone owns a smartphone.

Problem

Solution

The shipped flow gave customers a self-serve way to generate a verified statement: a PDF embedded with a QR code and a digital stamp, checkable by anyone who needed to confirm it was genuine, without a human in the loop on Safaricom's side. Because a meaningful share of M-PESA's user base uses feature phones, the flow needed a USSD path alongside the smartphone one, treated as a requirement rather than a secondary option, since a verification tool that only worked on a smartphone would have excluded exactly the customers least able to make a special trip to a branch instead.

Key design decisions included:

Verified PDF statements embedded with QR codes and digital stamps for authenticity.
USSD fallback to ensure non-smartphone users could still validate statements.
Seamless integration into the existing M-PESA app for scale and trust.

Result

Daily visits to Customer Experience Centres for statement verification dropped by tens of thousands, and related support tickets fell by 40%. Customers got a verified document they could produce anywhere, and Safaricom got a fraud check that didn't depend on a person's judgment at a counter.

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