Sabi Market – Powering SME Growth with a Seamless Wallet

Client Name: Sabi Market Industry: B2B eCommerce & Fintech Objective: Build a secure, scalable Wallet (Payment Account) that improves payment reliability, simplifies refunds, and enables SME users to access financial tools like loans, transfers, and POS tracking. Scope: Discovery, UX Research, Prototyping, Visual & Product Design (Figma), Iteration with LRC & Engineering

Sabi’s existing payment stack couldn’t keep up with the platform’s rapid growth. We needed to reimagine payments as a first-class product experience to:

Support large B2B FMCG transactions with regulatory constraints.

Enable fast, automated refunds to restore buyer trust.

Reduce the 3+ hours/day of manual reconciliation for sellers.

Offer an inclusive experience that worked for both formal and informal SMEs.

Refund failures & regulatory limits: CBN transaction caps and refund delays eroded user confidence.

Fragmented buyer experience: Multiple payment options with no escrow or split-payment logic.

Manual seller reconciliation: Growing operational complexity delayed payouts and caused support issues.

Financial exclusion: ~70% of Sabi’s retailers lacked formal business registrations, complicating KYC compliance.

Conducted interviews and in-field observations with:

Mapped user journeys across buyers, sellers, and internal ops to design flows that reduced friction for all.

Trust Through Clarity: Clear balances, limits, and refund visibility at all times.

One Wallet, Many Possibilities: Unified across checkout, refunds, and withdrawals.

Tiered Simplicity: Support both formal and informal SMEs with progressive verification steps.

Step 1: Basic identity collection during onboarding.

Step 2: BVN/NIN verification with built-in lookup assistance.

Step 3: Photo verification with liveness detection.

Step 4: Additional docs for higher tiers.

Tier 1 (₦50,000): Essential transfers and basic payments.

Tier 2 (₦200,000+): Advanced payments with partial refund capabilities.

Tier 3 (₦1,000,000+): Premium access with bulk payments and credit facilities.

Account Dashboard: Unified view of balances, escrowed funds, and quick actions.

Transaction History: Searchable and filterable for better transparency.

Withdrawal Setup: Simplified linking to external accounts.

Transaction PIN: Multi-layered security for high-value transactions.

Add Money: Flexible funding via transfers, QR, and more.

Withdraw Money: Transparent and predictable flows for cashing out.

Embedded wallet payment directly into checkout.

One-click payment from available balance.

Smart routing between personal and business accounts.

Automatic fallback to external payment methods when needed.