Cutting the #1 rejection reason for a diaspora-focused investment platform

The problem

Daba serves African diaspora investors across 6+ countries submitting documents from wherever they live, not necessarily where the document was issued. Users kept selecting the country they were physically in rather than the document’s issuing country, or picking the wrong document type entirely — the single largest cause of rejected verifications on the account.

My approach

Traced rejected jobs back to a pattern: diaspora users conflating current location with document origin. Rather than pushing UX copy changes alone, proposed relying on the platform’s own document-type auto-detection for high-quality document markets, removing the decision point that was tripping users up. In parallel, flagged a separate AML issue where news-media watchlist matches were surfacing clearly invalid hits.

What I built

A revised country/document selection flow (country-only selection with auto-detection) for high-confidence markets, plus an internal “pending” review queue built on verification result codes so ambiguous documents get a 24-hour human review instead of an outright reject.