BlishPay
Industry
Fintech
Company
Blish Technologies
Service
Product
Date
Feb 2023—Jan 2024
BlishPay was designed to address the trust challenges in African social commerce through a personalised escrow-style payment experience.
The opportunity
Social commerce has become one of the fastest-growing ways to buy and sell across Africa, but trust remains a major barrier. Buyers often worry about losing money to fraudulent vendors, while sellers need assurance that customers will honour their commitments. BlishPay was created to bridge this trust gap through a personalised, escrow-like payment experience that safeguards transactions for both parties.
As the founding designer, I led the end-to-end design of the product, from research and product strategy to user experience and interface design. Working closely with the founder and developers, I designed the core transaction experience, including Blish Secure, a trust-first payment system that helps buyers and sellers transact with confidence.
My role
I owned the product strategy and design execution for BlishPay, creating a trust-first payment experience for African social commerce.
Designed the platform's core transaction experience, including onboarding, payments, virtual cards, and dispute management.
Created Blish Secure, a personalised escrow-like system that helps buyers and sellers transact with confidence.
Collaborated directly with the founder and engineers to shape product strategy, define requirements, and deliver high-quality implementations.
Drove continuous product improvement through user research, prototyping, and iterative design, ensuring the solution met both user and business needs.
User research
I conducted a quick online survey in order to get a real-life, hands-on perspective on users' past experiences to better understand user pain points and drive design decisions.
Key findings:
Many people either knew someone close to them who had been a victim of dishonest vendors or had been a victim themselves.
Many users, especially entrepreneurs, small business owners and social media shoppers, would be happy to have a payment platform that not only helps them make payments during purchases, but also helps them secure their funds if fraudulent activity is discovered.
Market research
On the market side, Africa has made huge leaps in the fintech sector, with products like Send by Flutterwave, Paystack, Selar, Bumpa and many others trying to fill the social e-commerce gap, but a quick comparison of these products showed that most of the advantages they have over regular banking apps are confined to:
Transaction speeds
Ease of doing social business
Setting up a quick online store
The major user pain points that have been left unsolved so far, which we set out to solve with BlishPay:
Protect online buyers and sellers of products and services from fraudulent actors.
Help vendors and buyers build trust through a profile reputation system.
Key design decisions
Reframed escrow from a financial mechanism into a trust product, making transaction protection intuitive for users who may have never interacted with traditional escrow services before.
Embedded transaction agreements directly into the payment flow, enabling buyers and sellers to align on expectations upfront and reducing ambiguity throughout the transaction lifecycle.
Increased transparency by designing a shared transaction state model, giving both parties real-time visibility into payment status, fulfilment progress, and next-step actions.
Created a structured dispute resolution framework that transformed conflict management from a reactive support process into a predictable and user-guided experience.
Reduced cognitive overhead by breaking complex financial workflows into clear, progressive steps while preserving the confidence and control users needed when handling money.
Established scalable foundations for trust and safety, ensuring the system could support a growing range of transaction types without compromising simplicity or user trust.
Outcome
BlishPay transformed high-risk social commerce transactions into a structured, trust-driven experience. By combining payment protection, shared agreements, transaction visibility, and dispute resolution within a single workflow, the platform enabled buyers and sellers to transact with greater confidence and accountability.
As founding designer, I helped establish trust as a core product capability, turning a complex financial challenge into an intuitive experience that made online commerce safer, more accessible, and scalable.
