Credit, inside onboarding

The challenge

Standard Chartered Ventures brought us in as design and solution partners, not just executors, to find a financial product inside Easy24, a B2B marketplace for drinks and foodservice run for Pernod Ricard. That put two clients in the room from day one: SCV, who wanted a venture that could prove out and scale, and Pernod Ricard’s Easy24 team, who needed something that actually fixed how their wholesalers and outlets worked day to day. Those two things were not automatically the same problem, and getting them aligned before we designed anything was the real first task.

Outlets still ordered on WhatsApp. Wholesalers would not bring new retailers onto Easy24 without the operations team, because they had no way to trust a new account. There was no ERP connection to lean on, and informal credit was how the market already worked. Onboarding more outlets was the growth goal SCV cared about. Credit was the reason it had stalled, which was the problem Pernod Ricard’s team actually had.

Onboarding and credit were the same problem. Neither client had put those two things together before we did, and one without the other was not going to move.

How we got to the bet

I led design on a four-person team: a product manager, a delivery manager, a client engagement director, and me. We ran three workshops, in this order, each one answering a different question before we let ourselves design anything.

• Assumptions workshop, first. What did SCV believe about wholesalers and outlets, what did Pernod Ricard believe about them, and where did those beliefs disagree. This set the actual questions for the interviews instead of us guessing what to ask.
• Twelve interviews, wholesalers and outlets, testing those assumptions against the people who would actually have to change how they worked.
• Blue Ocean workshop. Once we knew where the real friction sat, this is where we looked for the one or two moves that would differentiate Easy24, instead of just digitising WhatsApp with extra steps.
• Solutions workshop. SCV and Pernod Ricard’s Easy24 team in the same room, ideating on the same interview evidence, so the prototype that came out the other side carried both clients’ fingerprints, not just ours.

That sequence is why this project reads as workshop heavy, and it is also why the credit bet held up once we tested it. It was not our idea handed down. It was the thing both clients converged on once they were arguing from the same data.

Both sides, one onboarding

The interviews split cleanly. Outlets wanted a channel as easy as the chat they already used. Wholesalers wanted risk off their books before they would grow the network, and they were afraid of losing the accounts they already had if they asked anyone to change.

The onboarding had to serve both without becoming two products. An outlet arrived with a code from the wholesaler’s sales rep, or picked from a list. CorpPass filled the business. The same flow attached the relationship and opened the question of credit, instead of saving finance for a later project.

Credit as the product

The bet came directly out of the Blue Ocean workshop: onboarding friction and financing were the two levers neither wholesalers nor competitors had touched, because both required trust neither side had built yet. So the bet was not a nicer signup. It was an instant limit in the onboarding, a recommended line the wholesaler could assign, visible at checkout, so an outlet could order without a handshake. Buy now, pay later sat next to it as another way to take risk off the wholesaler.

That is what the screens on this page are: a proof of concept on Easy24’s existing platform, built in a day straight out of the Solutions workshop, so we could test the actual bet rather than a new product.

Why it is short

This was an opportunity sprint, not a launch. The useful part was the alignment work, three workshops and twelve interviews, that turned two clients’ separate goals into one credible bet. It reached the bank’s internal ventures funding quorum, which is a different kind of outcome from a conversion rate, and worth saying plainly rather than dressing it up as more than it was.