Japan Outbound, built for a market that doesn't tolerate generic

Context & constraints

Japan was a greenfield send-country launch, not a localization pass. The product needed to support Furikomi bank transfers, Japan’s Payment Services Act, and mandatory electronic identity verification before a customer’s first transaction. Remitly partnered with Liquid for KYC, with separate verification flows for citizens and permanent residents versus other residents.

The vendor experience ran in a webview inside the Remitly app. Japanese currency conventions also needed to hold across the whole flow: yen amounts without decimals and exchange rates displayed as 1 JPY = X. Several teams shared ownership of the launch, while Legal and Compliance reviewed key decisions.

Problem

Foreign residents and immigrants in Japan—3.4M+ foreign nationals, with +110–125k/year inflow—had no way to send money home through Remitly. The market sends an estimated $10B+ a year outbound with no adequate local option.

Solution

The Japan launch delivered a complete send experience across the calculator, recipient and sender details, residence status, KYC handoff, and send summary. It met the mandatory pre-transaction eKYC requirement while removing redundant data entry, using the auto-scraped ID data presentation that drove an 82% eKYC success rate.

My role

As the designer across the customer-facing experience, I worked across four product teams on the calculator, recipient and sender details, residence status, KYC handoff, and send summary. I coordinated with engineering, localization, Legal, and Compliance so that market-specific decisions stayed consistent from one surface to the next.

Key decisions & trade-offs

Because Liquid’s identity scan could collect sender details from an ID document, I proposed removing a separate manual sender-details step and confirming the extracted information after KYC instead. This reduced duplicate entry, including for customers using non-Latin scripts, while retaining an explicit review point.

I framed residence status as a guided choice with plain-language context, rather than asking customers to interpret a legal classification on their own. I also designed preparation and confirmation screens around the Liquid webview so the vendor transition felt intentional, and documented yen formatting as a shared system rule rather than a screen-by-screen localization detail.

Outcomes