Case Study · Consumer Fintech · Hero MotoCorp

Hero Retail Finance

A unified retail-finance platform — customer, dealer, and Hero HQ on one financing journey, with real-time multi-bank approvals.

Design Manager 3 surfaces · 1 platform Multi-bank · SBI · Axis · Kotak

The fast read

A unified digital platform that integrates retail finance into Hero MotoCorp's two-wheeler sales ecosystem.
Three audiences, one source of truth: customer web, Dealership Sales Executive (DSE) tablet app, and Hero HQ admin dashboards.
Multi-bank integration — SBI, Axis Bank, Kotak — with real-time EMI comparison and a 6-step financing journey.
Drove higher conversion, faster turnarounds, fewer drop-offs, and a measurable lift in NPS for finance.

Context

Why this got built

Hero MotoCorp sells millions of two-wheelers a year in India. A meaningful fraction are financed — but the financing experience in 2022 was fragmented. Customers chose at the dealership counter, paperwork was offline, approvals took days, dealers couldn't see status, and Hero HQ had no real-time visibility into the funnel.

The opportunity was to fix all three failures with one platform. The brief: integrate retail finance seamlessly into the sales ecosystem, end-to-end, so customers, dealership staff, and Hero teams could manage the entire financing journey with transparency, speed, and trust.

The problem

Three audiences, one journey

For the customer

"I want a two-wheeler, I need finance. I want to compare offers, understand my EMI, get approved fast, and see status without calling anyone — not be at the mercy of whichever bank the dealer pushes."

For the Dealership Sales Executive (DSE)

"I spend nearly half my customer-facing time on financing paperwork instead of selling. I can't tell the customer what their EMI will be without making three phone calls. I lose deals when approvals take more than a day."

For Hero HQ

"We can't see where customers are dropping out of the financing funnel. We can't pressure-test bank-partner performance. We can't optimise because we can't measure."

My role

Design Manager — team, client, journey

Led the project team across the three surfaces and owned client interactions with Hero MotoCorp. The bank-partner integrations (SBI, Axis, Kotak) were already in place at the client end — our work was to understand what data each integration exposed and design the experience accordingly.

My day-to-day was journey architecture, blueprint discipline, design QA across the team's output, and the steady work of keeping three audience-specific UIs coherent. Field research at dealerships was scoped together with the team; the research members ran the sessions and we synthesised findings as a group.

Approach

One journey, three windows into it

The naive approach is to build three separate apps for three audiences. The unified approach is to build one platform with three audience-specific UIs over a single backend journey-state-machine. I pushed for the unified approach, even though it doubled the architectural complexity of v1, because the alternative would have meant the dealer and the customer seeing different "facts" about the same loan application — a trust killer.

The 6-step journey became the spine: pre-approval, offer selection, loan form, sanction letter, booking, delivery. Every status update propagates to every audience in real time. The DSE can see the customer's pre-approval status before the conversation starts. Hero HQ can see drop-off rates per step, per region, per bank.

Key decisions

Four trade-offs that shaped the product

Decision 01

One source of truth across three surfaces

The cheaper engineering path was three apps over three databases. We weighed the trade-off as a team and committed to a single backend with three audience-specific UIs. The architectural cost was real, but the trust cost of contradicting status across surfaces would have been worse. The team built the unified model together.

Decision 02

Multi-bank EMI comparison, presented neutrally

Hero had commercial relationships with multiple lenders. The temptation was to nudge the customer toward the highest-commission bank. We landed on a comparison screen led by EMI clarity — same loan amount, same tenure, presented identically — and defended the framing together in client reviews.

Decision 03

The DSE app: enabling, not policing

Dealers are commission-driven. An early instinct was to design the DSE app around tracking dealer performance. We reframed it together: dealers need to be enabled, not policed. The team designed the DSE app around finishing the deal; the metrics Hero HQ wanted are derived from the journey, not from reporting steps imposed on the dealer.

Decision 04

Sanction letter as a UX moment, not just a document

The sanction letter is the legal-trust artifact for the customer. Most banking apps deliver it as an email attachment hours later. We landed on the sanction letter as an in-product moment — generated, signed, and downloadable inside the platform. The team designed the moment; we aligned the bank-partner stakeholders together on what their compliance teams would accept.

01 / 04

Outcome

What changed

Financing journey reduced from days to a single session for most customers.
DSE finance-paperwork time meaningfully reduced; sales time recovered.
Hero HQ gained real-time funnel visibility — drop-off, TAT, regional and bank-partner performance.
Improved NPS for the financing experience; higher approvals; fewer drop-offs at every step.

Specific numbers available on request — some still under post-launch reconciliation.

Reflection

"The hardest part of consumer-fintech UX isn't the consumer surface — it's keeping three audiences aligned on one source of truth without breaking the trust each of them needs."

Hero Retail Finance was the work that convinced me multi-stakeholder design is its own craft. When customer, dealer, and HQ each have a stake in the same transaction, you can't optimise for one without harming the other two. The job is to find the design that's fair to all three — and then defend it.