Onboarding is a largely understated element in the noise around digitalisation.
Financial providers themselves don’t tend to bemoan so-called abandonment rates in the same way as one hears about cart abandonment in the e-commerce space.
But facing the reality of onboarding frustrations for the customer is a real opportunity for organisations in all sorts of ways.
Consultancy firm Arkwright recently undertook some research to take stock of onboarding processes in different countries across Europe and see where they fell short, or not.
Arkwright deployed an extensive team of scorers to apply for products within a sample of 198 online current account and credit card application processes across a range of banks and neobanks.
They targeted five European countries: Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK as well as the region of the Nordics (Norway, Sweden and Finland combined).
The secret shopper report identified some key areas ripe for improvement.
The judging criteria fell largely under the following five banners: website performance, degree of digitalisation, trust, user journey, user experience.
Findings revealed inconsistencies across processes within the same institutions, for example, a different experience for credit card opening than for account opening.
To a large extent, however, the report highlighted how each of these elements impacts and builds trust as a user interacts with the interface.
Trust can therefore be taken as the most important one.
Trust, essentially, is what banking and payment organisations ultimately trade in.
They bank on it, quite literally.
It is an inherent and intangible part of any interaction with such an organisation for a customer and yet it means everything.
Arkwright says untapping the potential of an optimised digital onboarding process has led to improved conversion rates of “nearly 400%” in their experience.
The good news, therefore, is that organisations just need to imbue their digital processes with the organisational ethos to not only boost onboarding success rates but also strengthen and hence, take pride in their brand.
In the report, trust was measured by providing a “safe feeling” throughout the process, promoting user confidence through consistent branding, and clarifying privacy issues and data protection queries.
“Consistent URL structure, effective branding, and transparent conditions,” all play into earning the trust of a customer, according to the report.
“Clear communication of the legal basis and the transfer of brand identity throughout the entire process are key aspects for creating a trustworthy environment.” Never were truer words spoken.
Onboarding is the ultimate gateway – it is where financial organisations acquire and retain their valuable customer base, where the roots of loyalty are put down and the seeds of fruitful lifelong customer relationships.
It really is where the best practices and products need to be shown and it is at this point that the trust factor actually swings in both directions too, as the institution needs to verify and authenticate a genuine users and protect itself and the ecosystem against fraud.
The stealth onboarding testing results showed German banks to inspire the highest levels of trust, followed by Spanish banks.
Identify your USP
Arkwright isn’t the only one to be making noise about onboarding processes of late.
Some link it heavily to identity solutions.
Many identity solution providers extol the virtues of a rigorous and frictionless onboarding solution way beyond reliability and simplicity: they inspire customer confidence and brand loyalty.
To go further, many feel incoming regulation (PSD3, DORA, Consumer Duty), in stipulating even greater rigour in this process should be viewed as encouragement to grow revenue rather than a mere compliance exercise.
Payments Cards & Mobile Opinion:
Onboarding should be where new or updated anti-fraud methodologies should be championed and executed, particularly with new customers, to bear down on new fraud vectors and ringfence that which has already slipped through.
And again, clarity of communication, transparency and consistency of process and brand and efficiency are what builds confidence. In the end, confidence builds confidence.
Banks must get on board with their own brand.
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