Russell Norris

Just Be: Merchant Acquiry Platform

Making it simpler to collect payments and track your business performance

— PROJECT NAME

Just Be (NatWest)

Payment Platform


— ROLE

Copy Director

@ R/GA London


— DATE

Summer 2018

Just Be was a new merchant acquirer backed by NatWest. What’s a merchant acquirer? In a nutshell: whenever you use your debit or credit card, it’s the company that lets your bank know it needs to make a new payment. It’s what Visa and MasterCard do every day. But Just Be wanted to do things differently.


Aimed squarely at smaller businesses who wanted to be part of a community, Just Be was a new platform for shops and merchants who didn’t just want to make sales. Its mission was to help business owners track their data across weeks, months and years to find new insights and boost customer loyalty.

The concept of Just Be, later launched as Tyl by NatWest

A new tone of voice

Everything started with a new tone of voice. How would Just Be speak to small business owners? What principles would it follow across mediums but, most crucially, inside the user experience itself? I wrote a simple TOV guide that set the scene for a new verbal identity.

Just Be was designed as a cross-device service, from the card machines that take your payments to the tablets and laptops you view your performance on. I wrote every stage of the UX ecosystem, starting from the moment when a business owner first asked for a service quote.

Get a quote

First, users found out for themselves if Just Be was the right service and price point for them. We guided them through some simple questions to give an upfront quote. I wrote the flow in a conversational style, with minimal jargon, giving supporting info where possible to keep everything crystal clear.

Create your account

Once users signed up, they created their account. I wrote the onboarding experience with busy readers in mind: clear progression markers, simple headlines and helpful tooltips that gave more context for industry terms like ‘chargebacks’.

Tracking and insights

The platform came into its own when users plugged in and started using it. We found new visual and verbal ways to present three core data categories: Customer Habits, Shop Trends and Spending Behaviour. The microcopy really took the lead here, inspired by conversational UI. At all times, we wanted to turn complex data into simple, actionable insights – and do it in a human way that spoke straight to the user.


See below for some snapshots of conversational data.