Overview
Modena's credit product was the company's core offering from the start. I joined in early 2021 and reworked the initial BNPL flow — at the time the only product, with limited merchant and customer adoption. Over four years, the product expanded into six distinct credit products: BNPL, hire-purchase, small loan, consumer credit, business loan, and business credit — all built around the same application flow.
The loan portfolio generated by these products later became the basis for the Investor Portal, which was built to fund that portfolio externally. The credit product came first; the investor side followed.
The Problem
In 2021, split payments at merchant checkout weren't an established offering in the Estonian market. Merchants had existing payment solutions but no way to offer deferred payments to customers at the point of purchase. Undecided customers who couldn't or wouldn't pay the full amount upfront had no middle option — they either bought or left.
Modena's BNPL gave merchants an additional payment option alongside their existing providers. Customers could spread a purchase across 1–3 months at 0% interest with no fees. The merchant paid a small single-digit percentage fee instead. This created a new conversion lever for merchants and a genuinely useful option for customers who needed a nudge.
Product Evolution
Growth came from building what merchants needed. BNPL was the starting point — an extra checkout option sitting alongside other payment providers. As the business scaled, Modena built out the full product spectrum: hire-purchase (6–72 month terms) for larger purchases, then bank payment integration after obtaining the payment institution license in 2022, then consumer loan products, and eventually business loans and business credit which matured by 2025.
The design challenge was keeping one coherent flow that could serve all of these products. Purchase-based products like BNPL and hire-purchase start with a pre-set amount from the merchant; loan products let the customer choose their own amount. Income verification is required for loans but not for BNPL. Business loans add steps for beneficiary information and bank statements. The flow had to adapt without fragmenting.
The Flow
The final application flow — shown in the prototype above — reflects the small loan product. Steps are shared across product types, with income verification skipped for BNPL and additional steps added for business products.
Loan Calculator
For purchase products, the amount is pre-set by the merchant. For loans, the customer selects it. Either way, the customer chooses a repayment period and sees the monthly payment in real time before committing.
Identification
Smart-ID, Mobile-ID, or ID-card authentication using Estonia's national identity infrastructure. Terms of use and privacy policy consent collected here.
Contact Info
Customer provides contact details. Identity data already confirmed in the previous step keeps this short.
Bank Selection
Customer selects their bank for income verification. Modena integrated directly with Estonian banks — no third-party open banking provider. Skipped for BNPL.
Bank Login & Data Consent
Customer authenticates with their bank and consents to sharing financial data. Presented as an embedded flow within the application.
Financial Data
Income and expense overview retrieved from the bank. Customer reviews and confirms the data used for the credit decision.
Overview
Full summary of the application, selected terms, and contract before signing. Last point to review everything.
Confirmation
Application signed and submitted. Clear success state with next steps communicated to the customer.
Key Design Decisions
Bottom-anchored primary actions. Every screen places the main CTA at the bottom of the viewport. Users always know where to tap to advance — no scrolling needed to find the next step.
6-segment progress bar. A thin progress indicator at the top of each screen provides orientation without taking up screen real estate. Completed steps fill with the primary dark teal, giving a sense of momentum.
One flow, multiple products. Rather than building separate flows per product, the architecture was designed to branch — same screens, with steps added or removed depending on the product type. This kept the codebase and the design system manageable as the product range grew.
National identity as a trust signal. Smart-ID and Mobile-ID are familiar to Estonian users. Integrating them made identification feel safe and routine rather than a friction point — the same principle applied to directly integrating with banks rather than routing through an unfamiliar third party.
Results and Impact
Over four years the product grew from a single BNPL offering with limited traction to a full credit product suite covering six product types. The portfolio generated through these products reached €16.8M in financed contracts — the majority through BNPL — and became large enough to warrant its own external funding channel through the Investor Portal. Despite covering six product types, the application itself remained fast: BNPL takes the least time, and small loans and consumer credit complete in under 2 minutes. The business loan flow is longer at 2–3 minutes due to additional steps, and unlike the other products it includes a manual review stage after submission — an intentional choice while we were still iterating on how to evaluate business creditworthiness.
The credit product was the engine that made the rest of Modena's financial infrastructure possible.
What I Learned
Building one flow to serve six product types taught me that good architecture in design is as important as in code. Decisions made early — step order, what data to collect where, how to handle branching — compounded over time. Getting those foundations right meant new products could be added without rebuilding from scratch. It also reinforced how much a product changes when you're actually in the market: flows that seemed logical in design needed rethinking once real customers went through them.