NPS onboarding took 20 minutes. PensionBox made it 2, Got Acquired by Zerodha
Building India's first purpose-built NPS account opening experience from scratch, at a fintech startup with no PM, that cut industry time by 90% and was acquired by Zerodha.
Outcomes
~2 mins
Avg completion
90%
Faster than industry
2L+
Users onboarded
Zerodha
Acquired by, 2025
My role
Nishit Mangal · PM, Designer, Researcher, Barista ;)
Joined Day 0 as the only founding designer & first employee. No PM. So I became one.Owned the design end-to-end. Led prototyping, user testing, developer handoff and post MVP testing.
About PensionBox
PensionBox was a retirement fintech built to help working Indians plan for life after 60. The core product let users track their retirement corpus, set savings goals, and invest through government-backed instruments like NPS(similar to 401k).
Just founders and me operating in a space most fintechs ignored. Retirement planning had no Zerodha moment yet. No one had made it simple, trustworthy, or mobile-first for the average Indian salaried professional.
That was the gap PensionBox was built to fill. In 2025, Zerodha acquired us.
Overview
In 2021, opening an NPS account in India meant 20-minute ordeal of long forms, government jargon, and random redirects to third-party portals that looked like scam pages. Every platform plugged into the same government API, painted a UI on top, and shipped it.
Nobody questioned whether it could be different.
I joined PensionBox on Day 0 as first employee. No PM. No design system. No prior version to reference. Just a problem: make opening an NPS account feel like something a 26-year-old would actually do.
I reverse engineered it, each step, each field was questioned, that’s how we cut that 20-minute industry average to under 2 minutes, onboarded 2 lakh+ users, and was acquired by Zerodha in 2025. The NPS onboarding module was a core part of what made that conversation happen.
Let’s break down the problem
National Pension Scheme(NPS) is a Indian government investment instrument, that focuses towards saving finances for citizens retirement. Just like how equity market is regulated by SEBI. NPS is regulated by PFRDA and Gov. handles distribution & complaince of APIs to fintech apps to build tech layer.
Industry problem : accepted a broken experience as the default
Every fintech that offered NPS treated it as a compliance checkbox. Offer the product, check. Build the flow, check. The flow itself was never the point.
The result was a category-wide failure. Government portals took 20+ minutes. Bank websites were no better. KFintech, the government's own partner portal and the backend every platform ran on, had a UI that had not meaningfully changed in years. PaytmMoney, the closest thing to a considered experience, still asked users for the same information twice across different screens and treated NPS as a side door feature.
The 20 minute average was not an outlier. It was the standard. Everyone had looked at the problem and concluded: this is just what NPS onboarding is.
We disagreed.
Visualizing market speed
The compliance & regulatory problem
The NPS account opening process is regulated by PFRDA. Every platform uses the same government API. The data it requires, the sequence it requires it in, and the partner redirects it mandates are all lengthy and exists without a proper Information Architecture. No platform gave a thought to it. You cannot avoid FATCA. You cannot skip PRAN generation.
Every platform had accepted this as the ceiling. We treated it as the floor.
User Problems
Before touching Figma, I spent time understanding the real nature of the drop-offs. I ran research across three distinct user segments.
The findings across all three groups pointed to the same root cause. It was not only that the process was long but also that users did not know if they were safe causing more time.
Process
Starting from the data model, not the screens
My first instinct was to open Figma. I did not. I spent the first two weeks mapping every field the API required, what data PensionBox already held for each user, and what would genuinely need to be collected fresh.
The NPS form, rendered naively from the API, required over 80 individual data points across five phases. That number is real and terrifying. It is also deeply misleading.
As mandatory by PFRDA, Every Fintech inc. PensionBox mandates users to complete a EKYC before they enter into NPS account flow. That captured full name, date of birth, PAN, mobile, email, and residential address — all with confirmed KYC. Cross-referencing against the API requirements showed that for a typical user, 60 to 70 percent of required fields were already in our system.
That single realisation was the entire product strategy. The question stopped being how to design a better form. It became how to eliminate the form.
Visualizing data schema
Talking to users before drawing anything
With the data model mapped, I ran card sorting sessions with 20+ users across all three knowledge levels. Two specific questions guided everything: where do users mentally group information, and where do they feel unsafe?
Users consistently separated identity information (who I am) from financial information (how I pay) from investment information (where my money goes). The government API organised fields by technical dependency. Users organised them by emotional weight.
Anxiety peaked at three moments: entering PAN and Aadhaar together on one screen, the payment step, and the redirect to KFintech. Those two insights — mental grouping and anxiety mapping — became the architecture.
Card sorting
Testing two architectures
Once we had the Information Architecture ready. We preformed A/B testing with users on into 2 variants.
Variant A: API-native sequence
Fields empty by default. Users typed everything. Steps matched the technical dependency order. Clean visual design and better IA.
Variant B: User mental model
Fields pre-filled from KYC. Users reviewed and confirmed instead of typed. Steps grouped by emotional weight. Trust signals at every anxiety point.
Variant B was faster. More importantly, it felt safer. Seeing their own data pre-filled with reasoning, did not feel invasive. It felt like the platform already knew them. For a product asking users to trust it with their retirement savings, that recognition was the most powerful trust signal we could have built. Variant B went to production.
The start screen: set expectations before asking for commitment
Every competitor dropped users directly into a form. No orientation. No sense of how long. Our start screen showed the full journey as a checklist before the user tapped anything. Five steps with icons. The first step already showed "Already Filled" in a green chip to nudge user and subtly communicate that “we are fast”.
Redesigned status framework
Pre-fill with consent: the mechanic that changed everything
Initially, there were three transitions in the step where the bottom sheet (with the buy/sell option)
moved to the order card.
The form was not a form. It was a review flow. Every screen surfaced pre-filled data from PensionBox's KYC records. A "Review Autofilled Details" CTA made the mechanic explicit from the first screen. Edit icons on every field made control visible without cluttering anything. Most users moved through Personal Details in under 30 seconds, because we made typing largely unnecessary.
Info icons: translating government language into human language
Nobody had explained what FATCA, PRAN, Tier 2 Account meant. Users saw them, felt confused, and dropped. We rewrote every government-originated label, added tooltip info icons to explain jargons. The rule was simple: if a user would pause on reading this, rewrite it.
Chunked forms: one thing at a time
Data collection was reorganised into single-purpose screens grouped by user mental model. Each screen had one heading, one logical group, a visible step counter, and one primary action. Every screen ended with a micro-completion state — a brief "Saved" confirmation and step counter advancing. Not decoration. The pacing mechanism that kept users moving forward instead of feeling like they were grinding through a form.
Save and resume: designing for real life
NPS requires documents. Not everyone has their PAN card, Aadhaar, and bank passbook ready in one sitting. The original experience had no session persistence. Close the app mid-flow and start over. We built persistent state across sessions. When a user returned, they landed on a resume screen showing exactly where they left off, which steps were done, which documents were still needed, and a progress percentage. Mid-flow abandonment dropped almost entirely within a month of shipping.
