It’s a question we have asked ourselves recently. Not with regret but with a particular bewilderment that comes from looking at where you have ended up versus where you thought you were going. We certainly did not set out to build an onboarding platform and yet, here we are. In the coming weeks we will be launching Onboarding By Elorn, our onboarding platform.

So how did we get here?

We started with a different destination in mind! When I joined Elorn in November 2022, the company was focused on a clear objective: becoming an FCA authorised Electronic Money Institution. Like many businesses operating in payments, we believed obtaining our own licence would give us greater control over our future, our products and ultimately the value we could deliver to customers.

Over the following months we invested heavily in that ambition. We built systems, documented processes, strengthened controls and prepared ourselves for life as a regulated entity. In June 2023, we submitted our application and waited for the outcome.

As anyone who has been through a regulatory authorisation process will tell you, these journeys are rarely straightforward. By early 2024 it became clear that the application wasn’t going the way we had hoped. We sat with that for a while, probably longer than we should have, before accepting that the right call was to withdraw the application. It was a genuinely gutting moment. We’d invested real time, real money and a lot of ourselves into the project. Walking away from it was very hard and anyone who tells you pivoting feels exciting in the moment is probably selling something!

For a while we found ourselves in an uncomfortable position. The destination we had been pursuing was no longer available. The obvious question was: What do we do now?

With hindsight, that question turned out to be one of the most important moments for our company.

The Detour

Like many businesses faced with a setback, we spent time searching for the next big idea. One of those became The Onion, a platform designed to help new businesses navigate the steps required to improve their chances of success.

On paper, it sounded promising. But as we began exploring it in more detail, we encountered a much bigger challenge: we struggled to turn the idea into a clearly defined product. Every time we tried to answer seemingly simple questions, the answers became blurred. The concept was broad enough to be interesting, but not focussed enough to become a product with a clear value proposition.

This lack of clarity showed up in a very practical way. We struggled to consistently explain the idea in a concise elevator pitch. But looking back, that wasn’t really the problem - it was the symptom. If we couldn’t clearly articulate the product, it was because we hadn’t yet clearly defined it ourselves.

So, we moved on….

Discovering what we’d really built

While working towards our EMI licence, we built an onboarding process for our online EMI platform. The goal was simple: convert prospects into customers as quickly as possible while still collecting the information necessary to remain compliant and properly assess risk. We wanted onboarding to be efficient for our customers without compromising on controls.

As we reflected on the technology we’d built, a simple question emerged: What if this is the product?

The more we looked at it, the more sense it made. Businesses of all types need to understand who they are dealing with before they become customers. Some have regulatory obligations, others simply want better information, better processes and better outcomes. So we took the onboarding engine out of the FX platform and started developing it as a standalone product.

That became Onboarding by Elorn.

Starting again

Our first version worked, technically. But in March 2025 we collectively made a decision that, although painful at the time, was absolutely correct. We weren’t taking this version to market.

The features were there, but the user experience wasn’t. The design lacked polish, consistency and the professionalism that customers would expect from a product they’d use every day. So, we started again.

We were already using Figma but we adopted a tighter design system, and standardised components using Material UI. We tried to bring structure and discipline into both design and development. And unsurprisingly, we got plenty wrong!

We redesigned screens, reworked workflows, rebuilt components, scrapped ideas that looked great in mock-ups but fell apart in reality. We learned lessons from mistakes we’d rather not have made, but which ultimately made us stronger going forward.

Why am I telling you this?

Because start-up stories are often told backwards. People see the finished product and assume there was a clear plan from the beginning. There wasn’t. There was a failed application, abandoned ideas, expensive mistakes and more than a few moments of doubt. Not every person who started this journey with us was right for where it ended up and not every decision we made about people was handled as well as it could have been. That is on us. Some decisions took longer than they should have and some lessons were learned the hard way. But every step, even the unsuccessful ones, helped shape the product we are about to launch.

Today, in July 2026, a small but now highly efficient and effective team is preparing OBE for User Acceptance Testing. We’re incredibly proud of what we have built and we have learned that sometimes the best products aren’t the ones you set out to build, they’re the ones you discover along the way.