Multi-User Account Login

2021

Role
Lead product designer

Team
Juliana Vislova – Head of Design
Jake Keuhlen – Back-end/Front-end eng
Monroe Ekilah – Front-end eng

Context

The goal of this project was to create a SSO for users with multiple accounts on Mercury. Primarily, this feature is helpful for entrepreneurs with multiple entities/subsidiaries with separate EINs, which require separate bank accounts. Second, a lot of customers on Mercury will utilize third-party bookkeepers and accountants who already have login credentials with another client and want to easily switch between different user accounts.

This would be the first step to eventually allowing the Mercury team to fast-track applications if a user decides to open up a new account for another subsidiary or wants to make instant transfers between accounts on Mercury (due to the large network effect).

Constraint: At the time of the build, we didn’t have the backend infrastructure to create multiple user profiles under a single email login credential. Our V1 solve was to encourage users to either use separate emails or use a new email with modifiers (e.g. janedoe+acme@gmail.com), so they can successfully create a new user profile with all correspondence sent to the primary email.

Link another user account

Users can access the linking feature in the profile card on the bottom left panel. We educate users that the links made between user accounts will be bi-directional and only visible to the user.

Because linking user accounts is sensitive and poses some security risk, we ask users to verify with a token/backup key. As soon as the link is made successful, we send an email to all affected accounts.

Unlinking user accounts

The user can unlink a user account at any time. To distinguish between the types of unlinking (unlinking a single user account vs. unlinking all user accounts), we used this simple graphic to communicate the linked relationships and the destructive action.

User account states

We used status badges to communicate states for user accounts that are in review, needs attention (e.g. business details), locked (e.g. fraud activity), or declined.

Users will open up new Mercury accounts for another subsidiary and want to link that user account to their primary account for easy switching between the two.

Linking two sets of user accounts

If users link two user accounts, which already come with their own set of links, we repurposed our two-panel modal to communicate the other links that would be connected if the user proceeded with the action.

The user is able to view all links in the scrollable view.

Updates to security settings

The user can access all linked user accounts from the settings page and either individually unlink a user account or unlink all accounts if they have 2 or more user accounts.

Adding multi-user account login support for iOS

Unlinking a user account.

If a user has opted into push notifications for multiple user accounts, we replaced the title copy with the respective company name to differentiate the PN at a high-level.

Tapping into a PN for a different company would automatically switch the account during sign-in and would trigger both the toast message and respective transaction detail modal.