UPDATE NOMINEE | AXIS BANK | 2025
Designing FD nominations for India’s new multi-nominee banking regulations
This case study is about a nomination flow I designed for Fixed Deposits in response to India's 2025 banking regulation overhaul — a pattern that was later adopted across 4 product teams at Axis Bank.
TEAM
Product Designer
Product Manager
Engineering
Compliance/Legal
Product Owners of
3 other teams
MY ROLE
Conceptualization
Design
UX Copy
Prototyping
Dev handoff
DURATION
2 weeks
2 iterations
Context
In November 2025, the Banking Laws (Amendment) Act, 2025 and the updated RBI nomination directions came into effect. The key changes:
Depositors can now appoint up to 4 nominees for Fixed Deposits, with two allocation methods:
Simultaneous — percentage-based split across nominees, totalling 100%
Successive — priority-ordered nominees, where the next becomes eligible only if a higher-priority nominee is unavailable
The goal: reduce post-death disputes, speed up claim settlement, give customers finer control over how their deposits are distributed
This regulatory change applied across multiple Axis Bank products simultaneously serving approximately ~59 million overall customers— Retail Mobile Banking , Corporate Banking, Branch of the Future (BOTF), and other deposit journeys.
The design challenge
How do you collect 3–4x more nominee data
without creating 3–4x more friction?
The existing flow supported one nominee per FD. Now it needed to support up to four — each with their own details, address, and a new allocation step. A naive implementation would mean repeating the same long form up to four times. And for most Indian families, the nominees are from the same household, sharing the same address.
What existed before
The existing FD creation flow:
Select funding source (Axis Bank account or other bank)
Enter deposit amount
Set tenure
Choose interest payout method
Nominee details — if the user’s bank account already had a nominee, that name was pre-filled. Options: keep existing nominee, enter a new nominee, or opt for no nominee.
For a new nominee: Name, Relationship, Address, DOB. If the nominee was a minor: guardian’s name and guardian’s address.
No concept of multiple nominees. No allocation. No centralized nominee management.
First attempt — and what broke
My first iteration took the straightforward approach: a long scrollable form collecting all nominee details at once. After one nominee, the user could "Save & Allocate" or "Add Another." Address reuse was an inline checkbox — easy to miss.
I tested this with 17 users — internal Axis Bank employees and actual customers. No one abandoned the flow — nominee addition isn't optional. But by the time they reached the third nominee and were asked to enter an address again, for someone who lives in the same house, the frustration was visible.
The insight was specific: the friction wasn't the amount of data — it was the redundant data. Users didn't mind 5 fields for one nominee. They minded the same 5 fields four times when the bank already had most of it. The design needed to treat nominee and address data as shared assets across the customer's banking relationship.
The solution
I restructured the flow around three principles:
Don't ask for data the bank already has — pull nominee and address details from across the customer's relationship with Axis Bank
Separate concerns — who are the nominees, where do they live, how should the funds be split
Make the complex parts feel optional — smart defaults, progressive disclosure, convenience shortcuts
The Manage Nominees hub + selecting nominees
I introduced a dedicated Manage Nominees page — this didn't exist before. It gives users a single place to view and manage all nominee details and allocation settings for any FD. It's both the entry point for setting up nominees and the page they return to when they need to change anything.
On the FD Details page, a contextual nudge informs users about the new multi-nominee option. Clicking "Know more" opens an educational bottom sheet explaining Priority and Percentage allocation in plain language. The nudge auto-dismisses once the user acts on it.
From the hub, when the user taps "Add Nominee," they land on a master list of all nominees across their Axis Bank relationship — savings accounts, other FDs, insurance, any linked product. Instead of filling a blank form, they just select. If someone isn't in the list, a lightweight bottom sheet collects only the essentials — name, relationship, DOB. No address yet. For most returning users, this step is selecting, not filling.
Assigning addresses
Nominees appear as tabs at the top. The user taps each tab to assign an address from a shared pool of existing addresses — communication address, permanent address, and any address already assigned to another nominee in this flow.
The key interaction: once a user adds a new address for one nominee, it immediately appears in the pool for the others. For a family living in the same house, this means entering the address once instead of three or four times. A tick appears on each tab once that nominee's address is assigned, and the CTA stays disabled until all nominees have addresses.
Tabs instead of separate pages — because switching between nominees should feel instant, and the user should see the address pool growing as they go.
Allocating funds
The user chooses how the FD is distributed between nominees. I renamed the regulatory terms — "Successive" became Priority, "Simultaneous" became Percentage — because users shouldn't need a legal glossary to manage their money. I proposed this change to compliance, and it was accepted.
Under Priority, nominees appear in a drag-and-drop list — hold and drag to set the order. Under Percentage, the maturity amount is shown upfront so users know what they're splitting. Each nominee gets a percentage input with the calculated rupee amount shown below it in real time. A "Distribute equally" toggle auto-splits evenly — I changed this from a radio button in V1 to a toggle in V2, because having three competing selection states (Priority vs. Percentage vs. Distribute Equally) created unnecessary cognitive load. The running total updates live and turns orange when it doesn't add up to 100%. Once the user fills in percentages for all but the last nominee, the final field auto-fills with the remaining percentage.
Review, confirm, and the updated state
A Review page shows everything — FD details, nominee details, allocation settings — each with a section-level Edit button that takes the user back to the specific step, not the beginning of the flow. After mPIN authentication, the success screen confirms the setup, and both the Manage Nominees hub and the FD Details page reflect the updated state.
Key design decisions
Cross-product adoption
The regulatory change applied across multiple Axis Bank products simultaneously. After designing the pattern for Retail Mobile Banking, I proactively reached out to product owners of other teams — Corporate Banking, Branch of the Future (BOTF), and other deposit journeys — and presented the pattern as a shared solution.
The pattern was adopted as-is across 3 additional product teams beyond Retail. This wasn’t mandated by a design system team — I initiated the alignment. The result:
Reduced duplicated design and engineering effort — teams didn’t need to solve the same problem independently
Consistent nominee experience across Axis Bank products — a customer managing nominees on Mobile Banking and BOTF encounters the same flow
Faster implementation — teams could reuse the validated pattern instead of designing from scratch
The core reusable elements: the master list pattern, the 3-step structure, the address pool, and the allocation UI with Priority/Percentage naming.
What's next
Post-launch instrumentation — I've recommended to the product team that we track time-per-step, drop-off points, and how often users select from the master list vs. adding new nominees. This will validate whether the shared-asset model is working as intended.
Still here? Let's make something ↓
What I'm looking for
(go on - tick all three)
hard problems with no rule-book
a team that sweats the craft
room to own the whole problem
P.S find me here ↓
samasaishreya@gmail.com
linkedin.com/in/shreya-sama/
