Making a BaFin-regulated investment flow feel safe enough to finish

Crowdinvesting falls under BaFin, Germany’s financial regulator. Every step from sign-up to investment carries requirements: identity checks, disclosures, payment handling. WIWIN needed an investment and self-service platform that met all of them.

Compliance rules don’t care whether a flow is pleasant, and every requirement adds a step. In investing, extra steps feel like risk. If a flow is confusing, people start to wonder whether their money is safe, and they leave.

Three external providers, for KYC, payment and tokenization, also had to feel like one product to the investor, and the platform was built with a nearshore team.

• Owned the investment and self-service platform end to end, working with the nearshore team.
• Translated the compliance constraints into a usable flow, so the rules shaped the design from the start.
• Integrated the three external services: KYC, payment and tokenization.
• Ran lab usability testing to find where the flow lost people’s trust.

Conversion rose 50%, from making the flow feel more secure and removing steps it didn’t need.

I treat regulation as a design input, not something to route around. That now applies directly to AI: the EU AI Act is putting AI products in the same position crowdinvesting was in, with obligations the product has to meet and users who need to trust it anyway.