OneID
OneID's no-document customer verification helps people prove their identity details without uploading documents or sharing selfies. Instead, it uses consented primary bank data, combined with multiple additional data points, to confirm identity securely and with minimal friction.
While working at OneID as the sole designer, I evolved the 1-year old product balancing regulatory requirements with customer needs and end-user trust. By evaluating product fit, identifying adoption pain points, and refining the end-to-end user experience, we orchestrated multiple data signals into a clear, simple flow, increasing completion rates and securing our first enterprise contracts.
Impact:
+47% user completion rate | +15% user adoption | -91 sec to complete
Company
OneID®
Role
UX/UI Designer
Service
UX/UI
Timeline
Jan 2022
Understanding the problem
As a B2B2C identity product, the challenge sat across end users, customers, and OneID as a business. I focused on understanding where their needs aligned and where they conflicted.
End users
Convenience over document scanning
Concerns around privacy
Trust not a given, even with low friction
Drop-off at key verification points
Customers
Need more flexibility in verification methods
Edge cases blocking adoption (joint accounts, non-UK)
Bank journey too long for e-commerce flows (age verification)
OneID
Smoother first-time experience than competitors
Concerns around long-term cost models
Competitors benefit from low-cost re-use
Inflexible product structure
User testing insight
Framing the approach
After identifying the core issues, we developed a comprehensive approach to re-think our product proposition.
The insights pointed to structural limitations in trust, coverage, and cost, but addressing all of them at once would have introduced unnecessary risk and complexity.
Instead, the initial focus was to stabilise and improve the existing bank-based journey, where small UX and UI changes could unlock immediate gains in completion, while buying time to explore broader product shifts.
This phased approach allowed the development team to deliver fast impact without committing prematurely to larger architectural changes.
Approach
1
Refine UX/UI based on identified pain points through user testing and the user behaviour data.
2
Re-evaluate product-fit and coverage to ensure we are solving a problem for both customers and end-users.
3
Identify opportunities to make journey faster for returning users, and cheaper for OneID.
Optimising what exists
These usability and visual changes focused on reducing cognitive load at the most sensitive points of the journey, particularly where users were asked to connect their bank.
Result: +X% increase in completion rates.
From embedded to controlled environments
Before
OneID was embedded directly within customers’ pages, limiting control over layout, responsiveness, and overall experience.
After
I've moved the OneID journey into a modal or new tab (customer optional), to give OneID control over design and accessibility, ensuring a consistent experience across customers.
The shift also unlocked new distribution models. A new-tab experience made easier for customers to trigger verification via email, or generate QR codes for in-person scenarios, such as age checks in self-service environments.
Reducing cognitive load
Before
The first screen of the OneID had a heavy onboarding-style content. This broke the natural flow from customer-OneID-back to customer, and felt overwhelming and complicated.
After
A simple message focused on value-added and what's being verified.
Findability and bank access
Before
Drop-of was 21% higher among desktop users at the time to go to their bank. Desktop users had to use their bank website, which often requires several-steps login. I've made a decision to improve bank access by offering users the chance to scan a QR code and open their bank app, which usually only requires a face scan to login.
After
A QR code was introduces enabling users to decouple from desktop to their mobile banking app.
Designing for recovery and learning
Before
There were no error paths apart from a generic 'Something went wrong', with lots of technical jargon.
After
I've identified which errors we could recognise and created a UI and user path to recover those journeys. For example, users who selected an unsupported bank account could retry using another bank.
Error Handling
Re-evaluating product fit
While optimising the bank-based journey delivered strong gains, it also exposed structural limits: it restricted international coverage, excluded scenarios such as joint accounts or users without UK bank access, and remained too slow for some use cases like age verification for e-commerce.
It became clear that refining a single verification path would not scale. To support broader customer needs and long-term growth, the product needed greater flexibility in how checks could be completed.
Expanding coverage
To address the limitations of a bank-only approach, the product expanded to support additional verification methods alongside bank verification.
Linear fallback
At a first stage, document scanning could be configured by customers either as a fallback when bank verification failed. Over time, we added a series of other identity providers so meet different requirements and compliance needs.
What it enabled:
Users without digital bank accounts
Joint bank account holders
International users
An alternative for openbanking errors
New limitations emerged:
Use cases (e.g. employment pre-screening) require document scans for regulatory reasons, but also wanted bank verification for additional checks like AML.
Age verification for e commerce didn't want a fallback system, but multiple options for users to choose from.
The shift to orchestration
At the same time, customers began requesting additional signals to meet specific KYC and compliance needs, multi-verification journeys and more flexibility over the provider flow.
It became clear that no single method could satisfy all use cases, and that expanding coverage meant combining checks, not just offering alternatives.
Orchestration and system thinking
The product was restructured around an orchestration layer, where verification checks became modular components that could be combined based on customer, regulatory, and use-case needs.
This shift allowed customers to assemble verification flows like a puzzle, selecting only the checks required for their context, while preserving a consistent user experience.
Moving to an orchestration model was a deliberate trade-off. It introduced substantial backend complexity and upfront engineering effort, but unlocked long-term flexibility.
Cost, reuse, and business model
Cost-per-check was reduced by 2/3 for returning users.
Impact
Measurable Outcomes
Increase in success rate
User adoption
(for key client)
Time to complete
(for returning users)
Next steps
At scale, identity verification stopped being a flow to optimise and became a system to design.
Reuse was the first step in that shift. Users can now choose to save their verified details, which significantly reduces friction for those who return to the same service often. For professionals repeatedly signing documents in DocuSign, for example, identity checks no longer feel like a repeated hurdle.
As we prioritised enabling reuse quickly, we have not yet built a full user-facing layer around it. Today, users can exercise their right to be forgotten in line with GDPR, but this still requires contacting OneID directly.
The next step is MyOneID, a dedicated portal I am currently shaping. It will give users visibility and control over their verified data: tracking their identity activity, seeing which organisations have verified them, managing permissions, and deleting their data directly.
If orchestration strengthened the platform, MyOneID strengthens the relationship. It moves OneID beyond a background verification tool toward a transparent identity layer, where users can clearly see and manage how their data moves.
This is how the platform continues to mature, from invisible infrastructure to user-facing trust.
A quick glimpse of current studies for the MyOneID portal:
Get in touch
a.galvao@outlook.com
linkedin.com/in/amanda-galv/
@2026 London