Work

PayPal

  • Fintech
  • Growth
  • Product Strategy

A debit card people finish signing up for

PayPal Debit Card: rebuilding card enrollment inside the PayPal app around identity checks and fee disclosure, and adding cash back offers, so more people finish signing up and start using the card the same day.

PayPal Debit Card screens in the PayPal app: the Finances hub, the card details page, and the cash back offers hub

Impact

20%
Faster card applications
18%
More cards activated the same day
25%
Fewer support calls about shipping

Business

Case snapshot

Role
Owned the design direction · Strategy and the core flows
Surface
PayPal mobile app: enrollment, card home, rewards, notifications
Partners
Product, engineering, compliance and legal, The Bancorp Bank, research
Timeline
Flows dated Apr–Jun 2022

The work

Sign up, use it today, then a reason to keep using it.

9:41

Finances

Total PayPal Balance

$151.00

Add Money

It’s a debit card that pays you

Use your balance anywhere. Earn cash back while you shop.

Transfer or add money

Try the flow

Enrollment, rebuilt from the flow files so you can go through it. Tick “Identity already verified” to see the branch for people PayPal has already checked.
Five enrollment screens: account setup with the fee list, identity confirmation, identity confirmed, choose a shipping address, and setting up the new card
The same flow at a glance. Saved addresses are offered as choices instead of a blank form, and identity confirmation shows its result before moving on.
Three screens: a prompt asking “Want to shop with your debit card today?”, a create-PIN screen, and the card page with the digital card number shown in a sheet
The physical card takes days to arrive. Setting a PIN gives you a digital card to use in Google Pay straight away, the day you sign up.
The card details page, annotated: available balance on the card, card details behind an eye icon, a carousel of card features, and Activity and Manage tabs
The card’s home. The balance is on the card itself, and a carousel suggests the next useful step: cash back, Google Pay, direct deposit, adding money.

PayPal Debit Card

PayPal Debit Card

Add Money

Love cash back?

Explore cash back offers for your PayPal Debit Card.

  • StarbucksPurchase · March 15$14.92
  • NetflixPurchase · March 12$14.99

Try the flow

Simulate time passing

Activate the Target offer first.

Cash back offers, rebuilt from the flow files. Activate or deactivate an offer, then use the buttons beside the phone to make a purchase or let an offer run out, and see the notifications that follow.
Three screens: the card page, the Cash Back Offers hub with Target, Walmart, Starbucks and Sephora offers, and an offer’s details in a half sheet with an Activate button
Rewards. Each offer opens in a half sheet with its terms (minimum spend, cap, days left) before you activate it.
Three screens: activated offers on the card page, an “Expiring soon” section in the offers hub, and a cash back earned total
After you activate: active offers move to the card page, offers close to their end date go under “Expiring soon”, and money earned shows as a running total.
An email confirming an activated cash back offer, a lock-screen push when an offer expires, and a push when cash back is earned
Outside the app: an email when you activate an offer, and a push when it expires or pays out.

Every dead end got a way forward: a failed identity check offers a document upload instead of starting over, ITIN holders get their own path, an address that can’t be verified comes back with a suggested match, PINs that don’t match are caught on the field, and an empty offers hub says when the first offers arrive.

The situation

68% of people who started applying for the card gave up.

The PayPal Cash Card is a debit card that spends your PayPal balance. Signing up for it was slow and complicated, and the card had no rewards at a time when competing debit cards were selling on cash back.

What people were asking

  1. “Do I have to load cash onto it?”

    The name “Cash Card” suggested a prepaid card you top up, not a card that spends the balance you already have.

  2. “What does it pull money from?”

    People couldn’t tell whether it was tied to their PayPal balance, their bank or another card.

  3. “Why this card and not another?”

    Competing cards offered cash back and savings. This one offered neither.

  4. “Can I use it before it arrives?”

    For people who wanted a virtual card, there was no clear way to add it to a digital wallet.

The goal

68% → 40%
Target cut in enrollment abandonment
1 flow
Enroll in several cash back offers without leaving the card

My scope

I set the design direction for enrollment and rewards, and the product strategy behind it.

What I owned
Product strategy, ideation and design direction for the new card experience, and the stakeholder reviews that got it built. Hands-on, I designed the value prop, the enrollment steps and the cash back offers hub.
The surface
Enrollment, the card’s home in the Finances hub, card details, adding money, the cash back offers hub, and the emails and push notifications that follow an offer.
Who I worked with
2 product managers, 9 engineers across iOS, Android and web, compliance and legal, The Bancorp Bank as issuer, 1 researcher, and 2 product designers: one on card home and settings, one on notifications.
How it was measured
Enrollment abandonment first, then application time, same-day activation, support calls and NPS.

The strategy we worked to (PayPal’s five pillars)

  1. Lead with cash back

    Wherever possible. It was the clearest difference from other debit cards.

  2. Say what funds it

    Make it obvious the card spends your PayPal balance, in stores and online.

  3. Simple and in context

    Show each step, offer and prompt where the person already is in the app.

The hard call

The goal was fewer drop-offs. I designed for confidence, not speed.

The obvious fix for 68% abandonment was fewer screens: push the fees and issuer copy out of the way and get people to the submit button faster. It would have moved the number for a quarter. I argued the drop-off came from doubt, not length: people didn’t know what a "Cash Card" was, what funded it or what it cost.

So Cash Card became Debit Card, the first screen leads with where you can use it, the fees sit on that same screen behind collapsible rows, and the identity questions say why they’re asked. The flow got a little longer to read and faster to finish, because people stopped backing out to check.

Before and after. Left: the Wallet tab, where the card was one row among many. Middle: the old value prop, “Get a PayPal debit card to access your money quickly”, under the Cash Card name. Right: the new value prop, “Use PayPal at all your favorite places”, with new card art.
Cash Card became Debit Card. The old value prop (middle) explained access to money. The new one (right) leads with where you can use it, and the new card art carries the name.

I designed less for conversion and more for confidence.

Working with constraints

Every screen had to carry a regulation, and still read in one glance.

  1. Identity verification

    US banking rules require legal name, a residential address (no PO box), date of birth and the last four digits of an SSN. The flow offers an ITIN instead, and explains why it asks, next to the fields.

  2. Fee disclosure

    The full fee list for the PayPal Balance account has to appear before anyone signs up. It sits on the first screen, behind collapsible rows rather than a wall of text.

  3. Issuer copy

    The Bancorp Bank issues the card under a Mastercard licence, and that language has to sit beside the call to action. The value prop puts the promise above it and the legal text below.

  4. An existing native flow

    Enrollment was built on PayPal’s existing native enrollment framework rather than from scratch, so the new steps had to fit its screens and its identity branch.

The native enrollment flow file: dashboard entry card, value prop with legal copy, a decision point for whether identity was already verified, then account setup and identity confirmation
The enrollment flow. If PayPal has already verified someone’s identity, they skip that step.

Legal first asked for the fee table as one static block. I negotiated collapsible rows with every fee name visible, which they accepted once each row opened to the exact regulated text. The issuer line stayed beside the button, so the promise moved above it instead of competing with it.

Impact

Faster to apply, faster to use, fewer calls about where the card is.

Business

20%
Faster card applications
18%
More cards activated the same day
25%
Fewer support calls about shipping

Customers

+9 pts
NPS among debit card users

Enrollment abandonment fell from 68%, short of the 40% goal.

Measured over the first 90 days after launch against the 90 days before, on the same entry points. NPS from PayPal’s quarterly debit card survey.

What I'd do differently

Two things I’d do sooner.

  1. I tested the new name late

    Renaming Cash Card to Debit Card was the biggest single change, and it only reached customers after the flows were built around it. A five-minute name test in week one would have settled it before it shaped every screen.

  2. Offers came second to enrollment

    Most of the effort went into getting people signed up. The offers hub, the reason to keep using the card, shipped with an empty state I’d now design first: new cardholders saw it before they had any offers.

For the detailed case study, reach out to me (opens Gmail in a new tab).

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