Census Pay

Census Pay is a mobile payments app for small and mid-sized businesses. Built on open banking, it lets a business pay another business account-to-account, receive its money instantly, and cut more than 50% off the transaction fees it would pay on a card or processor. I led the product design, from the first flows to the shipped app.

Overview

Most SMEs run on payment tools built for consumers or large enterprises. They wait days for funds to clear and lose a slice of every transaction to processor fees. Census Pay connects directly to bank accounts through open banking, so money moves between businesses without a card network in the middle, settled in seconds at a fraction of the cost. My job was to make that feel obvious and safe to a business owner who isn't a fintech native and doesn't have time to learn one.

Challenge

The bank-linking step was the first real wall. Connecting an account routes the user out to their bank's authentication and back, and any confusion there kills the flow before a single payment is made. I had to design a handoff that set expectations before the user left the app and reassured them the moment they returned.

A2A payments are also irreversible in a way card payments aren't, with no chargeback to fall back on. So the screen before a transfer had to surface the right details (who, how much, which account) clearly enough that a busy owner double-checks without feeling slowed down. And the states after it (sent, received, failed) had to be unambiguous, because "is the money there?" is the only question that matters.

I also had to make the lower fees legible without overselling them. The savings are real, so I showed them as a plain number at the point of payment, not as marketing.

Approach

I started by mapping the business's mental model, not the rails. Owners think in terms of "pay this supplier," "did I get paid," and "what did this cost me," so those became the spine of the app rather than the underlying open-banking mechanics.

For bank linking, I designed a guided handoff: a short, plain-language screen explaining what's about to happen and why it's safe, then a clear return state confirming the account is connected. The redirect stayed, but it stopped feeling like falling off a cliff.

For payments, I designed every state as a first-class screen: pending, instant confirmation, received, and failed with a clear reason and next step. The confirmation screen leads with the payee and amount, with the source account and the fee saving right below, so the decision and its value sit in one glance.

I kept the visual language calm and high-contrast, with generous spacing and a restrained palette, so it reads as a financial tool rather than a lifestyle app. I worked closely with engineering on what open banking could and couldn't return in real time, so the designed states matched what the system could actually deliver.

Outcome

Census Pay shipped as a focused, trustworthy app that does three things well: pay another business, get paid instantly, and pay far less to do it. The bank-linking flow turned the riskiest moment into a confident one, and the explicit payment states removed the "did it work?" anxiety that follows account-to-account transfers. The fee saving, over 50% versus card and processor rails, is shown plainly at the point of payment, which is exactly where a business owner decides whether a tool is worth keeping.

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