The challenge
FinPayz's onboarding flow was clear to the people who built it and confusing to almost everyone else. Support tickets clustered around the same three moments: linking a bank account, setting a payment limit, and understanding what happened after a failed transaction. The team wanted a single explainer that could sit inside the app, on the app-store listing and in ads — and it had to be equally native in Hindi and English, because roughly half their users switched the app to Hindi on day one.
Our approach
We wrote the film bilingual from the start rather than translating afterwards. Two scripts, developed in parallel by writers working in each language, with the same shot structure. The animatic was timed to both voice tracks, which meant a handful of shots had to be lengthened for Hindi — a change that costs nothing at animatic stage and a great deal after animation.
Visually, we built a clean, flat 2D style around FinPayz's brand system: a friendly hand, a phone that always faces the viewer, and a colour code for "safe", "pending" and "failed" states that the app itself later adopted. AI-assisted in-betweening let our animators focus on the key poses and the character acting, which is where the warmth in the film comes from.
- Animatic — bilingual timing locked in week one.
- 2D animation — hand-keyed with AI-assisted tweening for dialogue and UI sequences.
- Localisation — dialogue shots animated separately per language so mouth shapes and on-screen text match.
- Accessibility — captioned masters and a subtitled version for sound-off viewing.
The outcome
The explainer launched inside the app's first-run flow and on the Play Store listing, with the four feature loops embedded at the exact points in the UI where support tickets had been highest. The icon set built for the film became the basis of the help centre's illustration style.
“Our onboarding explainer had to work in Hindi and English without feeling like a translation. Merit delivered both cuts on schedule, and support tickets dropped.”
— Product Lead, FinPayz India
