Designing a €14K/Month KYC Revenue Recovery

Our Client

Our client is a tax platform serving consumers across Germany, Spain, and the UK through two product lines: a DIY filing product and DIFM (Do It For Me), an assisted service where a tax advisor handles the return.

They brought a strong product mindset into the engagement, which is what made fast progress possible. The company is forward-thinking in how it uses experimentation to learn, and its engineering organization is a real asset: the engineering manager and the KYC tech leads engaged proactively with product problems rather than only the technical ones, which shortened the path from discovery to a legally approved solution.

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The Mission: Onboarding and Activation Interim PM

Product People placed an interim Product Manager in the User Identity and Trust team (previously Activation), reporting to the Director of Product, so a strategically important area kept its momentum while the permanent role was being backfilled. During our engagement, the company expanded beyond annual tax filing to deliver year-round value, including document storage and access to tax advice outside filing season. As part of this shift, our client moved from the DIY/DIFM split to tiered offerings: Good for DIY, and Better, Best, and Tops for assisted products. The additional tier variation called for a more flexible KYC process so users could move between tiers without repeating identity checks that had already been approved.

They had concentrated its product capacity on the highest-visibility parts of the customer journey, and the Director of Product saw the opportunity to give KYC and user management that same level of product ownership: a documented roadmap, clear goals, and an explicit strategy. Leadership also wanted a more robust identity foundation so engineering capacity could go toward customer-facing value rather than compliance workarounds. During the mission, the combined team split into two, User Identity and Trust (our primary focus) and Activation, and the brief was to turn that opportunity into decisions the client could act on by structuring the problem space, defining a roadmap, and driving the highest-impact KYC initiative from discovery through to engineering handoff.

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Our Main Quest: Recovering Revenue Lost to KYC False Positives

Launch: Onboarded Very Fast

Gave product, engineering, and operations one shared and factual picture of how rejection decisions were actually made by running a KYC flow-mapping workshop in the opening weeks. The documented baseline covered all three product lines, DIY, DIFM Single Assessment (SA), and DIFM Joint Assessment (JA), which meant the problem space could be sized on evidence before any change was proposed.

Explore and Conquer: KYC Activation Friction

Our client had built a deliberately conservative compliance posture, automatically rejecting every PEP (Politically Exposed Person) or Sanctions match, and the team saw the opportunity to hold that standard while still giving eligible users a way through. Because 79% of those matches turned out to be false positives, a meaningful and recurring stream of revenue was being held up at the point of booking, and the engagement created the visibility needed to quantify it for the first time.

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Initiatives

Initiative 1: PEP/Sanctions False Positives

Opportunity: While DIY users require only identity verification to file, every DIFM user must additionally pass anti-money-laundering (AML) screening before their filing can proceed, placing that compliance gate directly at the entrance to our client's primary revenue stream. The expanded model that goes beyond annual tax filing to deliver year-round value likewise inherits the same AML requirement, so our client treated that gate as an asset worth strengthening. The incumbent KYC provider’s AML screening matched on First Name, Last Name, and Year of Birth only, without the more complete identifiers our client already sent, which produced a 79% false-positive rate on PEP and Sanctions checks. Roughly 90% of the automatically rejected users were PEP matches rather than Sanctions matches, which made them an addressable group and turned a compliance constraint into a clear revenue recovery opportunity. PEP, or Politically Exposed Person, is a compliance category covering politicians, senior public officials, and their close associates, a classification commonly flagged in anti-money-laundering screening.

What we did (results first):

• Focused the team’s effort on the single highest-value opportunity by running discovery across the KYC flow, mapping the problem space, and sizing each opportunity. The false-positive rate on AML screening rose to the top because it was holding up a meaningful, recurring stream of revenue at the point of booking.
• Opened a recovery path worth 14,000 to 16,000 EUR per month at the lowest available effort by exploring the alternatives, including a manual review path, and converging on an additional in-flow screen that lets a PEP match self-confirm they are not the flagged individual. The pattern mirrors the familiar self-certification question people already answer on legal and administrative forms, so it required no user education, and because the result does not depend on feature adoption, the forecast was unusually dependable.
• Protected DIFM conversion rate and kept the operations team free during peak season by placing the screen inside the flow rather than routing cases into manual review.
• Made the solution buildable and legally safe within the mission window by coordinating the definition across DIFM, Legal, and engineering, securing legal sign-off on the self-declaration copy in English and German, and handing over the epic, user stories, and finalized designs.
• Made the impact measurable from day one by building instrumentation into the solution definition and establishing a webhook latency baseline so screen performance and downstream latency could be tracked once live.

Initiative 2: KYC Provider Vendor Analysis & Benchmarking

Opportunity: Our client's KYC screenings ran through an incumbent vendor whose limited-identifier configuration, absence of no-code configuration, and limited support for complex verification flows were absorbing engineering time in workarounds. With that vendor’s annual contract up for renewal within months, the client saw the chance to turn a routine renewal into an evidence-based decision, and asked for a baseline that would make either path defensible: improving the incumbent setup or moving to a new provider.

What we did (results first):

• Gave the client a bar that any current or future vendor now has to clear by scoping and defining the top must-remedy issues with a cross-functional group spanning technical, product, and operations expertise.
• Made the renewal decision repeatable and comparable across options by building a vendor analysis space with a scoring rubric and a candidate database.
• Turned distributed expertise into a single shared source of truth by consolidating the cross-functional team’s recommendations on alternative KYC vendors and orchestration-layer options into one space, drawing on architecture, KYC product, operations, and the assisted service team, and by running a working session to capture KYC optimization requirements from the people closest to the process. That knowledge previously sat with individuals, so anyone joining the area can now get up to speed quickly.
• Left leadership ready to enter the renewal conversation from a position of strength with a documented framework for weighing "improve the incumbent setup" against "switch" ahead of the contract decision.

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Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests

• Created alignment and a shared vision for the coming quarters by consolidating KYC and User Management onto a single roadmap and team space with ICE-scored priorities through Q3, including written rationale behind each scoring variable. The Miro-based roadmap format made it easy for everyone to see what was coming next and how the team converged on a set of initiatives, and the Head of Product adopted it as the team standard for roadmap conversations with engineering and operations.
• Gave the team a durable way to move from raw idea to prioritized roadmap item by standing up a team space with instructions for capturing larger backlog items, applying RICE scoring, and linking them to the roadmap, and by documenting the initial problem space exploration as a reusable model for opportunity-first product work.
• Gave leadership the evidence to sequence roadmap priorities by running a discovery effort that compared two compliance initiatives on relative financial exposure and delivery timeline. A legally aligned PRD was drafted in parallel for the initiative selected to move forward.
• Cleared the way for the tiered product launch by completing identity-based KYC testing across all product scenarios and logging UX issues and bugs against the beta build. The move from tax-year-based to identity-based verification means users no longer repeat identity checks when they switch between products, which is what makes the year-round tiers, including document storage and access to a tax advisor outside filing season, practical to offer.

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

✅ 14,000 to 16,000 EUR per month in recoverable revenue unlocked by designing a self-declaration solution for the 79% false-positive rejection rate, with legal sign-off secured in English and German and the feature handed to engineering.

✅ A blocking dependency on the self-declaration screen placement resolved by establishing a webhook latency baseline of P50 130ms and P95 850ms across 90 days of data.

✅ Alignment across product, engineering, and operations on what comes next by building the KYC and User Identity and Trust roadmap with ICE-scored priorities through Q3, in a Miro-based format the Head of Product adopted as the team standard for roadmap conversations.

✅ A recurring measurement inconsistency was eliminated across the activation team by confirming the root cause of the Question Flow KPI drop and defining a CVR reporting best practice.

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