Background

Niva Bupa planned to offer health insurance plans directly to retail customers via Axis Bank’s digital channels. This initiative required a frictionless, user-friendly direct-to-customer onboarding flow that meets Axis Bank’s strict compliance, data security, and user experience standards.
The vision was to enable customers to browse policies, complete KYC and payment, and receive policy confirmation all in one seamless flow. This experience needed to work flawlessly on both web and mobile platforms without requiring any intermediaries.
Given the compliance constraints around data handling, KYC requirements, and audit trails, combined with a diverse customer base ranging from tech-savvy millennials to older users, the design needed to strike a careful balance between simplicity, clarity, and regulatory rigor.

Key Challenges

Regulatory and Bank Compliance: Axis Bank’s sub-zero guidelines mandated strict control over data capture, secure transmission, minimal data exposure, and comprehensive customer consent tracking. Every aspect of the solution needed to adhere to these rigorous standards.
Diverse User Experience Requirements: The flow had to be simple enough for first-time online insurance buyers while remaining robust enough for digitally experienced users. This required careful consideration of information architecture and interaction patterns.
Multi-Step Process Complexity: The process involves multiple critical steps, including plan selection, personal and health information entry, KYC verification, payment processing, terms acceptance, digital signatures, and final confirmation. Each step presents potential drop-off points that require careful design attention.
Device and Accessibility Constraints: Users access the platform from desktop computers, mobile devices, and tablets across varying bandwidth conditions. The flow needed to be fully responsive, performant, and accessible across all scenarios.
Data Security and Auditability: Insurance data is inherently sensitive. The system required secure storage, encryption, and comprehensive audit logs while still delivering a smooth and intuitive front-end experience.

Project Objectives

Design a clean, intuitive, direct-to-customer purchase flow covering the entire customer journey from policy selection through KYC, payment, digital consent, and policy issuance.
Ensure full compliance with Axis Bank’s sub-zero guidelines for data protection, consent management, and auditability.
Deliver a consistent, user-friendly interface that minimizes friction, maximizes clarity, and reduces drop-off rates.
Enable seamless backend integration, allowing instant policy generation, record storage, and automated onboarding.

Approach and Methodology

User Journey Mapping: We mapped the complete customer journey from first click through to policy issuance. This exercise helped identify high-friction points, including data entry, KYC document upload, payment processing, and consent capture. The journey was broken into logical, manageable steps: plan selection, personal details, health questionnaire, KYC upload, payment, consent, and policy issuance.
Compliance and Data Flow Design: We conducted a thorough review of Axis Bank’s sub-zero compliance requirements covering data encryption, secure transport protocols, explicit consent logging, minimal data storage principles, and audit trail generation. The backend architecture was designed to keep personally identifiable information and sensitive data isolated, encrypted at rest, and segregated per user session. A dedicated consent and audit module was created to capture timestamped user consents, IP and thread logs, and versioned user agreements.
UI/UX Design and Prototyping: We built a clean, minimal interface using neutral colors, clear typography, and progressive disclosure principles that only show fields needed at each step. A step-by-step wizard with a progress bar was implemented so users always know their position in the journey. The design was created for both desktop and mobile responsiveness from the outset. Key features included inline validation, helpful tooltips, and real-time feedback for issues like invalid formats or missing documents. Users could upload documents via drag and drop or mobile camera with instant preview functionality. After payment, a clear confirmation screen displays the next steps and policy issuance expectations. Interactive prototypes were built, enabling stakeholders to walk through the entire flow before development began.
Backend and API Integration: The solution integrated with payment gateways supporting multiple payment methods, secure tokenization, and callback-based confirmation. Document storage was connected using object storage for secure KYC uploads with proper access control. Automatic policy generation was implemented to trigger once payment and KYC verification are complete. Backend validation rules were established for mandatory fields, data formats, consent logs, and KYC document sanity checks.
Security, Monitoring, and Logging: HTTPS and TLS were enforced across the entire application. Data encryption was implemented both at rest and in transit. Comprehensive audit logs were created for consent events, data changes, and policy issuance activities. Monitoring and alerting systems were introduced for failed KYC uploads, payment errors, and suspicious activity detection.

Solution Delivered

A polished, user-friendly direct-to-customer onboarding flow enabling customers to purchase health insurance directly via web or mobile.
UI/UX built and validated through interactive prototypes, ensuring clarity and ease of use before development.
Full compliance with Axis Bank’s sub-zero guidelines, including consent logging, secure data handling, audit trails, encrypted storage, and compliant KYC handling.
Enable seamless backend integration to enable instant policy generation, record storage, and automated onboarding.
A backend that automates the entire process from data capture and validation to payment processing and instant policy generation once all inputs are validated.
Responsive design enabling access from desktop browsers, mobile browsers, and tablets, with compatibility across all devices ensuring maximum reach.
Documentation and training materials for support teams to handle exceptions such as KYC rejections without developer involvement.

Results and Impact

Raw data uploaded via the web portal flows through the AI-powered pipeline, undergoing intelligent parsing, transformation, validation, and loading into the standardized schema all within seconds.

Key Learnings and Best Practices

A clean, guided step-by-step experience drastically reduces user drop off even in complex flows.
Early prototyping helps validate UX assumptions and catches usability issues before coding begins.
Combining compliance needs with UX design rather than treating them as separate ensures both security and usability.
Automating policy generation and backend workflows streamlines operations and improves speed significantly.
Building a modular data and consent architecture helps adapt quickly when regulatory or partner guidelines change.

Strategic Value for Niva Bupa

As Niva Bupa expands its retail reach via direct-to-customer channels and partner banks like Axis Bank, having a robust, compliant, and user-friendly onboarding flow becomes a key differentiator. The system we built enables Niva Bupa to onboard new customers quickly, securely, and with minimal overhead. This positions them for faster growth and enhanced customer experience in an increasingly competitive market.

Conclusion

We successfully transformed the complex, regulatory-heavy process of retail insurance onboarding into a smooth, modern digital experience. By combining clean UI/UX design with strong compliance measures and backend automation, Niva Bupa, in partnership with Axis Bank, now offers a scalable, secure, and delightful direct-to-customer insurance purchase journey.
This project demonstrates how thoughtful design, rigorous compliance integration, and smart automation can work together to create digital experiences that serve both business objectives and customer needs.

Our Resources

FinTech & Banking

Retail & E-Commerce

Real Estate & Coliving Tech

Healthcare & Wellness

Digital Transformation for Axis Bank Sub Zero Compliance

Scope of work

Industry

Project timeline

is a top-rated full-cycle software development agency with over a decade of experience, delivering 250+ digital solutions in web, mobile, SaaS, enterprise systems, and product development for clients across diverse industries and regions.