Cut wasted OTP sends
Move verification to redeem time.
Solved at step 3
The card’s own OTP verifies the number when a card is bound.
OTP's biggest leak
OTP is DANA onboarding’s biggest cost, and one leak stood out above the rest: a user mistypes their number on the registration screen, we fire a code to a stranger’s phone, and nobody ever sees it. Money spent, user never arrives.
The team asked a blunt question: what if a new number skips OTP entirely, lands on a locked Home, and only verifies when they top up by card? The card OTP becomes the verification. No code sent until the user has already shown intent.
It was an unpopular idea. Risk and product pushed back, which is fair: letting people in before verifying them cuts against every fintech instinct. The mandate came from our COO, and it survived on one argument, the potential saving. Foreigners became the stage: a low-risk segment to prove the model on, and an expansion bet at the same time.
No foreign numbers allowed
Before: picture the arrival
A tourist lands in Bali, hunts for an ATM
Carries a pocket of cash
Queues at a SIM counter just to get a local number
Only then can they even open a DANA account
With Foreign Account: pay in Bali with your home number
Land
Bind a card
Use QRIS like a local
Before this project, DANA had no foreign capability at all. No QRIS for food and shops, no send and request money, no rides, no lifestyle buys, unless you owned an Indonesian number. With Bali alone drawing 1.4 million foreign visits in the first quarter of 2026, that gap kept the exact people who most needed digital payments locked out of them.
Goals
Register with an origin prefix
No local SIM. A new prefix selector is the first new control a foreign user meets.
Solved at step 1
The origin number goes in through the new prefix selector.
Make the locked state explain itself
One screen has to teach an uncommon model: you are in, but top-up unlocks the rest.
Solved at step 2
The Add Bank Card paywall states the deal and the fee before anything else.
Scope access honestly
Send, request, QRIS and lifestyle work. Indonesian-only services such as PBB and Samsat stay out.
Solved at step 5
The last step names exactly what unlocks; Indonesian-only services are not on it.
I owned design end to end as principal designer, working with a product manager, front-end and back-end engineers, QA, research, and copy.
Teaching an uncommon model
The hard part was mental model. Nobody expects an app to let you in before it verifies you, and the booth confirmed it: some screens needed explaining twice. So the dummy Home and the paywall had to do all the teaching on their own. Most iterations were wording, tested until a tourist landing at midnight could understand that topping up unlocks the rest.
Two framing decisions held: the phone input keeps its new prefix step up front, and the welcome screen stays in Indonesian as a deliberate immersion instead of a generic hello.
Selamat Datang
Onboarding sells the card, four ways
Onboarding stays in English across four screens. Every screen ends in the same action: add a card.
The flow that shipped
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Enter an origin number with the new prefix selector.
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New numbers meet the Add Bank Card paywall at once, fee disclosed; X escapes to the dummy Home.
Bind a card to use DANA, no top-up needed, pay directly, with a Rp15.000 (±US$1) registration fee stated up front. Tapping X slips through to the dummy Home instead, where almost everything still asks for top-up first.
Add Bank Card, fee up front -
Bind a debit or credit card, verified by the card’s own OTP.
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Pay directly with QRIS, no top-up step. Or top up first via the dummy Home path.
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The real Home unlocks: balance, send and request, QRIS pay, deals and feed.
Card linking, cashier confirmation, fee information, SMS OTP, and PIN creation sit inside that chain. Unsupported destinations route back with a clear not-supported state instead of failing silently.
What the booth taught us
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The partnership groundwork came first
Visa and DANA announced the first setup of its kind in Indonesia: pay QRIS and top up DANA directly with a Visa card, built on three pillars of QR cross-border, Foreign Account, and card binding.
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An activation booth inside the airport
The first contact was physical: staff helped tourists download DANA and register on the spot with their origin number. The design team wasn’t on the floor; the front-liners were our eyes. They relayed back what stumbled people, and that loop fed directly into the wording iterations.
The airport exposed what Figma could not. Word came back from the front-liners that correct foreign numbers were failing validation, with real tourists standing at the booth. Foreign SMS delivery was failing with them. The fix lived at provider and back-end level, not in copy, and it only surfaced because someone was watching strangers use the thing.
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The public launch
At the Padel DANA Open Bali Series in Canggu, going live nationwide on : origin number plus a bound card plus QRIS, pitched as paying like a local.
