Fintech · Web Portal
QFunder is Tradeling’s new fintech vertical. Banks rarely lend to small businesses because they see them as high risk, and when they do, it takes weeks. We built an MVP to test a faster way: apply online in minutes, get funded in 24 hours. Our approach was build fast, fail fast.
The opportunity
In the UAE, small and medium businesses are most of the market but get only a small share of bank credit.
So loans are hard to get: a long track record, a long review, and many businesses are turned down.
Branch visits, paper documents and manual checks, before anyone says yes or no.
They borrow to buy stock. If the money arrives too late, the deal is gone.
At a bank
With QFunder
How do you design a loan that is safe enough to approve, but fast enough to fund in 24 hours?
Product strategy
Manual checks were what stood between a business and its money. I pushed for automating every one of them for the MVP.
Tradeling already had their trade licence and company details. I made sure QFunder was connected to that data, so existing customers did not upload anything again.
Tradeling account
already on fileQFunder application
Nothing to uploadNew businesses verify the owner and the trade licence online, with Shufti Pro. No typing details in, and no waiting for someone to look.
Underwriting looks at two things: the business’s credit score from the bureau, and its bank statements. Reading the statements by hand was the slow part.
We built a system that reads the statement, summarises it and scores it. Underwriters now decide from the bureau score and one summary, instead of a stack of paper.
Bank statement
The design
For a new lender, trust is everything. I kept the page institutional but easy to read: no jargon, three clear promises (fast, simple, secure) and a loan calculator that shows the monthly payment before a business signs up.
Make onboarding too hard and businesses drop off. Make it too easy and we risk fraud. I broke one long form into short steps, with KYC verified instantly.
Simple enough to finish in 3–5 minutes. I removed the extra steps banks ask for out of habit and kept only the essential data.
A business sees its repayment schedule, its next payment and its payment history, and can pay from the same place. It always knows what it owes, so it can plan its cash flow.
Where it ended
We built the MVP and tested it with users. It did not launch, for reasons unrelated to the product work.
Lessons
Perfect is the enemy of good. We used Shufti Pro for KYC/KYB checks and an open-source loan management system (LMS), instead of building our own. For an MVP, that is a valid design decision: test the idea first, build later.
Trust is visual. In fintech, clean design is not only about looks. If a screen looks broken or cheap, people will not trust it with their financial data.
TAMM is Abu Dhabi’s initiative to bring government services into one ecosystem. The services were fragmented, so we built one unified digital system where citizens, residents, businesses and visitors complete them in one place.
iTraffic is RTA’s intelligent traffic management system. I designed its interface in 2019, in collaboration with ST Engineering: one place to watch the roads, respond to incidents, and run the signs and equipment on them.
