Sabi Market – Powering SME Growth with a Seamless Wallet
Bolu Obisanya
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Posted Sep 30, 2025
Redesigned Sabi Market’s payment account feature to create a more seamless, secure payment account experience for Africa’s wholesale and retail supply chain.
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Project Overview
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
The Challenge
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.
Key Pain Points
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.
The Solution
Research & Discovery
Conducted interviews and in-field observations with:
Retailers in informal markets: Open to wallet adoption if refunds were secure and instant.
Wholesalers & distributors: Needed transparency on payouts and balances.
Internal teams: Revealed operational bottlenecks around refunds and reconciliations.
Mapped user journeys across buyers, sellers, and internal ops to design flows that reduced friction for all.
Design Principles
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.
Core Wallet Experience (Figma)
Progressive Verification Framework:
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.
Tiered Account Structure:
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.
Core Functionalities:
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.
Checkout Integration:
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.