Kolmeo — Debit Now

Kolmeo was processing over $1 billion in rent a year across 60,000 properties, and tenants still had two bad options for paying it: automatic withdrawals they couldn't adjust, or a one-time BPAY code they had to re-enter every cycle. I designed Debit Now, a control-first payment experience that shifted trust back to renters. My remit covered end-to-end UX for tenant-facing payment flows, cross-squad alignment, MVP scoping, validation and iteration.

By 2024, Kolmeo was serving some of Australia's largest independent agencies, including Little Real Estate and Nelson Alexander, processing over $1 billion in rent annually. At that scale, the payment experience was still fundamentally broken.

Tenants had two options. Direct Debit automated withdrawals but stripped them of visibility or control. BPAY meant manually entering a single-use code in their banking app every time, which led to frequent errors, a steady stream of support tickets, and roughly $0.88 in fees per transaction, adding up to over $1M a year absorbed by agencies.

Kolmeo had recently shut down its native tenant app after some poor product decisions. Kolmeo for Tenants (KFT) was the reset: a browser-first, self-service product meant to lighten the load on property managers and hand control back to tenants. It had soft-launched with a small group of pilot agencies, but without a real payment experience, it wasn't delivering on that promise.

Debit Now was the answer. The challenge was introducing a new payment rail into a high-trust, compliance-heavy ecosystem without adding friction for any party in the triangle: tenant, agency, or owner.

Project goals:

• Integrate a new payment rail into the existing tenant app without disrupting established workflows
• Build trust and perceived control by clearly differentiating Debit Now from Direct Debit and BPAY
• Deliver a focused MVP under tight deadlines, prioritising high-impact features within backend and compliance constraints
• Design for system variability, so the experience held up even when Debit Now was unavailable or disabled for certain tenants

Tenants needed a secure, efficient payment method that gave them real control and flexibility. Direct Debit removed control entirely. BPAY replaced it with friction-filled manual work. Neither served the modern renter, and neither gave property managers a way to reduce support load.

The challenges I was designing around

Cross-squad alignment in a fragmented system. Debit Now needed coordination across two independently operating product squads. Misalignment between them created inconsistencies in UX direction, payment logic, and rollout sequencing. Keeping a coherent experience meant continuous alignment between Payments and Mobile, with every design decision accounting for technical dependencies and system-wide impact.

Tight timeline and shifting scope. The project ran on a 12-week MVP window under changing business priorities and backend constraints. Weekly reprioritisation meant not every intended flow could make the initial release. I had to make clear trade-offs: prioritise the high-trust, high-clarity flows and defer lower-impact enhancements to later phases.

The Australian rental tech landscape. Australian tenants are often sceptical of new payment tools, thanks to transaction fees, privacy concerns, and a general perception of landlord bias baked into rental platforms. The job wasn't just introducing a new payment method. It was designing something that actively reinforced autonomy, transparency, and control to counter that distrust.

Debit Now needed close collaboration with engineering because of backend dependencies and payment infrastructure constraints. Every technical review forced real design refinement, not just visual tweaks.

Three rounds of iteration

Iteration 1: Reducing system complexity. Early concepts prioritised flexible payment selection and visibility. Technical review surfaced backend limitations around payment state handling and reconciliation logic. I simplified the interaction paths and cut branching logic to fit the payment architecture, while keeping the tenant's sense of control intact.

Iteration 2: Strengthening validation and edge-case handling. As integration deepened, validation gaps showed up around bank account handling, authorisation states, and error scenarios. I built in clearer validation feedback, structured confirmation states, and proactive error messaging, so backend failures never surfaced to tenants as confusion.

Iteration 3: Trust, consistency, and accessibility. Final refinements focused on trust signals and visual clarity across the whole journey: improved hierarchy, tighter microcopy, and accessibility work, so a compliance-driven flow read as clear rather than restrictive.

Usability and concept validation

Early testing showed strong overall receptiveness to Debit Now, but it also surfaced trust dynamics that shaped the final design.

Naming and concept clarity. Debit Now was understood immediately and didn't confuse anyone. The value proposition was mostly clear, though users unfamiliar with tenant platforms needed a bit of contextual explanation. I reinforced benefit messaging and added subtle first-time-user guidance.

Trust and control. A key split emerged around automatic deductions. One group was comfortable with automation because they trusted their property manager. Our primary target group, the majority, was resistant, driven by trust concerns, past bad rental experiences, and a strong preference for manual control. That validated the whole premise: tenant autonomy, not automation, had to be the centre of the design. I leaned into manual control, clear confirmation states, and explicit visibility over payment timing and account selection.

Bank account setup preferences. Participants split between wanting the property manager to set it up for convenience, or wanting to set it up themselves for privacy and control. I prioritised tenant-controlled setup to reinforce security and autonomy within MVP scope.

Information architecture. Users expected bank account management to live under profile or avatar navigation, while "Preferences" read to them as broader payment control. I adjusted the IA and labelling to match those mental models and cut navigation friction.

"If my real estate agent was more to this way, I'd want to use the app because it's really easy and straightforward."

Visual design: adding a bank account, end to end

Connecting a bank account is where trust gets tested, so clarity and perceived security mattered more here than visual polish. The flow used a progressive, step-based structure to keep cognitive load low during financial input, with clear validation and confirmation states so backend errors never surfaced as user confusion. Consent moments during the Debit Authority signing were made explicit, and tenants got immediate visual confirmation once an account was set up, to cut the anxiety of "did that actually work."

Prioritised throughout: clarity over flexibility, validation over speed, confidence over automation.

Engineering handoff and implementation alignment

Given the financial and backend dependencies, a clean handoff mattered as much as the design itself. I defined detailed interaction states (loading, validation, failure, disabled), documented edge cases like duplicate accounts, invalid BSBs, and authorisation timeouts, and clarified backend-driven constraints directly in the Figma specs to avoid over-engineering. Rather than handing over static mockups, I stayed in the loop through builds, validated edge-case behaviour, and adjusted flows to keep frontend UX and backend logic consistent, which cut ambiguity and prevented rework during integration.

Debit Now launched within the 12-week MVP window and rolled out across 15 to 20 pilot agencies, reaching an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 tenants in the initial release.

Beyond the feature itself, Debit Now strengthened Kolmeo's competitive position by giving them a control-first payment alternative that spoke directly to tenant scepticism about automated rent systems. It shifted the perception of payment from something the landlord controlled to something the tenant drove, inside an ecosystem that hadn't earned much trust to begin with.