Zharkyn Kalysh

The new application form brought in +$2M in 2025

Cut the microloan application form from 8 minutes to 2: the user just snaps their passport and a selfie, and we issue a loan of up to $500.

Context

Alfa-Money — microloans up to $500 on your card in 5 minutes. There were two steps: first the user filled in their name and contacts, then passport details by hand.

10 fieldsin the old form
8 minutesaverage completion time
35%dropped off at the passport block

What problems we found

For the user
Need money fast, no time to fill out a formToo many fields — gets tired and quitsDoesn't remember passport by heart
For the business
We lose 35% during passport-data entryEvery form step shaves a few percent off conversionBad data → manual fixes → delayed payout

Goals

Discovery

Previously we only knew the overall drop-off number. We didn't know where exactly people quit, or why. So we went digging.

The key insight

MFO customers are a specific audience: students, people in debt, gamblers. Urgency outweighs privacy for them — a passport photo reads as a fair trade for getting the money fast.

User flow

We learned that the «marital status» and «education» fields didn't improve approval accuracy — their contribution to default prediction turned out to be statistically insignificant. Combined with user feedback from interviews, we dropped them. The loan itself is issued in the authorized zone — inside the bank's app.

Before

Fills in name, last name and contacts

Types passport details by hand

Fills in personal data

Gets approval or rejection

After

Snaps passport, address and a selfie

Reviews recognized data and ticks the consent boxes

Gets approval or rejection

Hypotheses

Hypothesis 1Confirmed

If we remove manual entry of passport fields and replace it with a photo — conversion to submission will grow

Variant A
Variant B
Result

Variant B won: submission CR higher by

+ 18 pp

Hypothesis 2Confirmed

If we tell the user what's happening during scoring — they won't close the tab

Variant A
Variant B
Result

Drop-off at scoring decreased by

−12 pp

Hypothesis 3Confirmed

If we add a button that opens the app and an animated visual for the approved amount — take rate will grow by ~10–15%

Variant A
Variant B
Result

Take rate grew by

+ 8 pp

Rejected ideas

Not everything we discussed made it into the MVP. Some ideas we rejected outright, some we parked in the backlog — here are the most telling ones.

Upload from galleryRejected

It opens a fraud hole — someone could submit a stranger's passport found online. With an in-app camera, we know the photo was taken here and now.

Video verification instead of a selfieRejected

More expensive to integrate, slower for the user. The level of protection is comparable to a liveness photo.

Post-analysis and takeaways

After release we collected metrics for 2 months. An A/B test: 50% of traffic on the new flow, 50% on the old form. The test group clearly beat the control, and the flow was rolled out to 100%.

×2faster form completion
7% → 15%take rate
+ $2M2025 revenue

What I learned along the way

  1. 1.18% use the edit mode for recognized fields — without it, we'd be fielding complaints about “it recognized this wrong.”
  2. 2.It matters to give users a choice — fill via passport or by hand. There are cases when the passport isn't nearby but the person remembers the details by heart; without the alternative, that user just drops off. This is going into the Q2 2026 follow-up.