Background

When I joined the Groww Pay team, we were already #8 in India for payments by volume—$0.7B monthly, 2.6M transactions.

At that scale, our basic ledger was struggling. No search, no filters, no way to view payments to a specific person. And since Groww Pay also powered investment transactions, users had to check three separate pages to find their history: UPI transactions, bill payments, and balance top-ups.

This problem was only going to get worse for our more active users. Over 500K customers had already made 10 payments on the platform. As they started to adopt Groww Pay as their default UPI app, we also saw a huge demand for a better experience. A better “Transaction history” was one of the most asked for features in our NPS surveys and also whenever we talked to our customers.

Opportunities

• Making finding past payments much faster: powerful search & filters
• Digestible, actionable spending analytics
• Payment category tagging
• Richer details: profile pictures, merchant icons, location data

Search & Powerful filters

Groww Pay is primarily a bill payment app. So after exploring a few ways I could lay the page out, I decided to keep only the Bills / UPI filter exposed. All other filters were one level deeper, things users would need on rare occasions.

Spending analytics

Over 100K transactions had notes attached—users who added notes did so consistently. This signaled demand for spending analytics.

To validate quickly, we shipped two lightweight features:

• Monthly net spend
• Payment tags (auto-tagged via MCC*, editable by users)

*MCC codes indicate transaction type—5812 for restaurants, 5661 for shoe stores. Not always accurate, but a useful default.

Hygiene improvements

Added profile pictures and merchant icons to make the page more scannable. Also fixed confusing entity names (e.g. "Bundl Technologies" → "Swiggy") for top merchants.

Clearer status icons

For our design system, I also proposed some changes to status icons to improve clarity in our communication. Yellow typically means "action needed," but users can't do anything while a transaction processes — they can only wait. I replaced the warning semantic with a neutral "processing" icon. We started using these icons in Payments, before propagating them elsewhere in the app.

To improve accessibility, I also wanted to remove our over-reliance on colour to convey status, especially in places where the icon is small. Each new icon had a specific, easy-to-identify shape.

Proactive comms for anxious users

Users are anxious about money. UPI payments can sometimes end up in a 'processing' state where money is deducted but the other person is not credited – leading to panic. This is why the ledger was also one of the highest WAU properties in the tab at 23%.

But, history shouldn't be solving this in the first place. We wanted to be more proactive in our communication around payments. This was a small win before we fixed bigger issues.

One more thing...

I also wanted to do something special with the success page and played around a lot with what we could do visually.

My personal design language draws a lot of inspiration from physical, recognisable objects which I translate into my work. Naturally, I looked at a lot of currency notes.

Users loved this. We adopted this style in other places in the app – like with IPO applications.

Conclusion

We shipped a transaction history that finally matched the scale of our product—search, filters, analytics, and a unified view across all payment types.

Beyond the ledger, I used this project to push for system-level improvements: accessible status icons and more proactive payment communication. Small foundations that will compound as Groww Pay grows.