An Onboarding to Remember: A Practical Guide

If customer onboarding is too long or too complicated, the bank might lose 60% of its potential revenue. Read a short practical guide how to avoid that – and how to achieve an onboarding to remember. 

Nowadays people use many online services just through their phones: hotel booking, airline companies, health, entertainment, education and so on. The more complex these services get day by day, the more customers expect a smooth, simple, and lean onboarding experience.  

Financial services customers are no exception.  “They expect this onboarding to be as simple as opening a Netflix account or booking a home on Airbnb”, said Boaz Burkunk, Senior Product Designer at EY VODW during a FintechOS webinar that explored customer onboarding in retail banking. The onboarding journey is the start of a bank’s relation with the customer. 

 In case customer onboarding is too long or too complicated, the bank might lose 60% of its potential revenue, as Signicat Research found out. How to avoid such a potential disaster? And how to achieve an onboarding experience to remember?  

 EY has investigated the onboarding experiences of four incumbents and four challengers. They have also taken these lessons on board, and re-imagined and redesigned the onboarding experience, considered from a range of different perspectives, including online usability, compliance and security, innovations and guidance and support. 

 Read below a practical guide that resulted from FintechOS’s webinar featuring speakers from EY Financial Services: 

• Bernadette Wesdorp, Senior Manager, Privacy;  
• Boaz Burkunk, Senior Product Designer; 
• Lysanne Jurjens, Senior Manager, Business Transformation; 
• Wouter van Groen, Senior Manager Technology Risk. 

#1 Create a really short time to value 

 People are still orienting a lot – especially with financial products – on desktop. At some point, banks will need to convert them to an app. More and more brands are doing that as soon as possible. Here is a practical advice from EY: try to create a really short time to value to draw people into the app. Because once you are in the app or kind of locked in, you can really create value for your people. 

 #2 Use concise copy 

 What helps in the cross-channel experience is to use concise copy that really calls to action and relates to the customer’s goal. But it must be short and simple. A lot of brands use like horizontal images. 

 #3 Keep the instructions close 

 A lot of guidance and help is done in a screen before the action takes place. It’s best practice to really make it contextual. So, when you’re asking somebody to do something, keep the instructions close by so they don’t have to navigate back and forth. And when it comes to telling a story, try to focus on what you can tell with the visual. People don’t read online, and they don’t want to read. 

FintechOS on Customer Experience 

Customer experience is the new growth engine in Retail Banking, Catalin Dediu, VP of Product Management at FintechOS, pointed out towards the end of the webinar. “Good digital CX is a source of improved customer acquisition, improved upsell, a reduced churn and cost reduction (through automation)”. 

 But what constitutes good CX? Read four action points from FintechOS: 

#1 Support customers in their Shopping & Research stage (the most important, but also the most challenging stage for most customers); 

#2 Match customers with relevant (personalized) products and services; 

#3 Deliver cross-channel customer journeys with an emphasis on UX that addresses pain-points; 

#4 Iterate products, services and customer journeys based on customer feedback; 

As a key take-away, Dediu concludes that “by tapping into the power of data and having the capability to expose it to whichever system, in a secure away, a bank can bring forward customer journeys, but also products and services that are relevant and personalized to each individual customer.” 

 In 10 years’ time from now, “traditional banking products – as we know them today – will diminish, and they will be part of an ecosystem of solutions that will take care of our personal financial management needs. They will be more proactive and automated”.  

 As a conclusion, Lysanne Jurjens, Senior Manager at EY Financial Services said that “the use of technology is very important to have to speed up the application of verification process”. However, there are a couple of important privacy principles to consider in the onboarding journey. One is transparency – which is part of GDPR, which is went into effect almost three years ago. 

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 Register now to watch the full recording of the webinar. 

 For more findings on this topic, ➡️download our whitepaper “Digital CX – The new growth engine in Retail Banking” 

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MAIN PHOTO Credit: Unsplash

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Related articles:  

Digital Onboarding Done Right: The Best Way to Win & Keep Customers 

Banking: What It Takes to Be Customer-Centric 

Phygital – The New Banking Frontier 

Is Gen Z The Next Big Thing in Banking? 

Future Tech Trends the Banking Industry Is Acting On 

FintechOS

FintechOS is the global leader in fintech enablement, on a mission to make fintech innovation available to every company. As the world grows increasingly complex, FintechOS strives to simplify and accelerate financial technology so anyone can build, launch, service, and expand new products in weeks, not months or years. The FintechOS platform empowers banks, credit unions, and insurers of any size to grow revenue, lower operating costs, and achieve a faster time to value without dependency on core infrastructure and costly tech talent. Headquartered in New York and London, FintechOS has partnered with some of the world’s best brands, including Groupe Société Générale, Admiral Group, Oney, eMag, Deloitte, EY, and PWC.