01 The situation
A sole proprietor applying for a business loan is not a salaried applicant with a clean paper trail. Some have a GST registration; some have several. Some have a Udyam registration instead. Some have neither, and still run a perfectly real business.
A lending journey has to establish who the applicant is, where they are, and whether the business is real — and it has to do that in an order that doesn’t lose people before they’ve had a reason to stay.
02 What made it hard
Every verification step is both necessary and a place where applicants quit.
- Identity checks come first by necessity, but they’re also where applicants hesitate most
- GST data is inconsistent across this segment — multiple registrations, none at all, or Udyam in its place
- Asking for a document someone doesn’t have ends the application, however good the rest of the flow is
- First-time borrowers need to trust that the journey genuinely belongs to the lender they came for
03 What I did
Sequenced the checks so each one earns the next. Mobile number and OTP first. Then PAN, with name, date of birth and gender fetched automatically rather than typed. Then the Aadhaar–PAN linkage check, then address and pincode — with serviceability confirmed before the applicant is asked for anything about their business.
Pulled GST from PAN instead of asking for it. Where the PAN mapped to several GSTINs, the applicant picks the right one from a list. Where it mapped to none, they can enter a GST number or a Udyam registration instead, upload a supporting document, or continue without one. Every applicant has a way forward.
Kept the lender visible throughout. Consistent branding across every screen, and the journey reachable from the lender’s own site — so a first-time borrower never wonders whether they’ve landed somewhere they shouldn’t.
My first instinct on journeys like this is to start sketching screens. The better starting point is two questions: which applicants are dropping out, and why. The answer decides which step deserves the most design effort — and it’s rarely the one you’d guess.
04 What happened
- The journey went live for sole proprietors, through the lender’s own channel and on a major loan marketplace
- Applicants without clean GST records got a real path through, rather than a rejection screen
- Identity, address and business checks ran in one sequence instead of as separate hurdles
05 What I’d take into the next one
When a requirement arrives, ask what problem it’s solving and for whom before touching a single screen. Most requirements arrive as solutions — “add this field”, “make it like theirs” — and the real work is walking them back to the person who’s actually stuck.
