Square · Bill Pay · Vendor acceptance
Getting vendors to trust their first Bill Pay payment
Sending payments converted. Payments struggled to complete. I owned the experience from bill creation through delivery, then redesigned the vendor side so an unfamiliar notification became a trusted invitation — and bank linking became something people could finish.
Results
52% → 73%
Vendor payment acceptance
21-point lift · ~40% relative
78% → 49%
Manual bank entry
Behavior moved, not just the headline
The situation
Sending payments converted. Payments struggled to complete.
I designed and owned the end-to-end experience from bill creation through payment delivery. The sender journey was performing as expected. However, the real constraint was on the other side of the transaction: the vendor.
Problem
52% of vendors completed payment acceptance.
I expected the problem to be getting vendors into the portal. The funnel showed three distinct drop-offs.
Understanding the barriers
I looked at recipient behavior, support feedback, and the experience from the recipient’s perspective.
Vendors received an unexpected payment notification from a platform they didn’t choose, with no word from the person they actually knew.
Vendors who clicked through hit a high-stakes manual task: routing number, account number, entered correctly on a phone, then wait.
Vendors who completed setup still didn’t reliably get paid. Manually entered details could look valid, pass every check, and fail silently days later.
I wanted to create an ideal system that supported these gaps.
Leveraging the sender / recipient relationship
Creating an ideal flow for vendor acceptance started with leveraging our sender flow.
Add a new step?
A whole new screen in a flow that was already converting.
In-line on bill details?
No new screen, but it loads a data-entry moment with a decision about someone else’s trust.
Leverage the Review step
Showing what gets sent belongs on that screen. Show only once to new recipients. Repeat payments are untouched.
The “trust” solution
Turn an unfamiliar payment notification into a trusted invitation.
I gave sellers a way to personally introduce Bill Pay when inviting a vendor to accept payment. A personalized note from the seller explained why the vendor was receiving the invitation.
“Here’s a payment notification” “Someone you work with is inviting you to get paid.”
Sender · customize the invitation
Making bank linking easier for vendors
I reframed the problem from optimizing bank entry to building a faster and more correct path.
Plaid shortened that path by letting vendors securely connect an existing bank account, verify the account during the flow, and avoid manual entry.
Plaid removed manual entry and an entire class of errors from typing a 9-digit routing number and 17-digit account number — a particular issue on mobile. More importantly, vendors could see and confirm their own bank account during the connection.
Tackling “effort” and “correctness” in the vendor portal
I partnered with a second engineer to integrate. And we kept manual entry as a fallback, so vendors always had another way forward.
Reducing effort. Plaid replaced the manual entry task with an authenticated bank connection and removed the conditions that caused funnel drop.
Addressing correctness. Plaid fixed this too, because it authenticated the account at the source rather than trusting what someone typed.
Vendor · new email to Plaid in the portal
What moved
52% → 73%
Vendor payment acceptance
21-point lift · ~40% relative
78% → 49%
Manual bank entry
Behavior moved, not just the headline
The number I wanted was completion, not clicks. Vendors were stalling because the first email felt like it came from Square, not from the person they already knew — and because getting paid meant typing a routing number on a phone and hoping it was right.
The note on Review made the invitation feel like it came from a real relationship. Plaid made the bank step something you could confirm instead of retype. Manual entry stayed as a fallback, so nobody got stuck. That’s why the mix shifted: fewer people typing account numbers, more people actually getting paid.
I shipped a design that led with trust and made it easier to accept.