Transform your financial organization’s onboarding with a digital account opening solution

In November 2022, Taylor Swift fans were eager to score tickets to her next world tour. But issues with the ticketing site such as five-hour queues, invalid promo codes, and slow-loading pages created a public outcry, with many missing out on the tour as a result. While many Swift fans were willing to wait for the chance to get concert tickets, the frustration and friction caused by inadequate technology would be a showstopper in the lending world. Consumers will abandon a digital account opening process if it’s not easy, intuitive, and fast.

In fact, 50% would abandon the onboarding if they had to answer more than 10 questions. Another study found that an estimated 70% of applicants abandon the process before they get to the signature stage. Further, asking customers to finish their account opening in a branch or requiring the upload of too many documents puts an institution at risk of losing out to the competition altogether.

In order to meet these increasingly entrenched expectations, financial leaders can look to comprehensive, cohesive account opening solutions. Here are a few challenges institutions face and how using digital processes can transform your organization’s onboarding.

As consumers move more of their banking activities to modern digital channels, their expectations of excellent experiences seep across a broader range of engagement points with financial providers. Here are a few common challenges specific to the digital account opening process that bank and credit union leaders currently face:

• More consumers prefer to apply via digital channels instead of traditional processes. Currently, only 70% of financial institutions say they offer a fully digital account opening experience. 
• Existing digital experiences are not optimized. While most banks and credit unions have online processes, only 66% say their customers can complete the entire digital account opening process via mobile app. 
• Consumers expect an omnichannel banking experience. Customers want the ability to bank across all channels without disruption. That includes starting to open their new account on a computer and moving over to a mobile app or visiting a physical branch to complete the process.

A successful digital account opening experience is driven largely by three components: risk, operational support, and the technology used to support them.

In order to mitigate risk, financial institutions must balance security requirements with ease of use for the borrower. At minimum, the account opening solution needs to confirm a consumer’s identity, verify the application is not fraudulent, and capture the correct amount of information to deliver a credit decision. Using a comprehensive digital solution allows financial leaders to streamline this process from end to end.

The right technology also gives financial institutions the ability to quickly alter workflows in response to arising challenges and evolving customer preferences. Ideally, it also provides insight into information a bank or credit union can then use to inform risk decisions. Overall, customers want to feel supported as they move through the application experience.

The Blend platform can help banks and credit union leaders deliver a digital account opening process that completes in as little as two minutes. Benefits of using Blend include:

Blend connects a wide array of consumer banking products into a consistent, application experience with higher conversion rates. This allows a financial entity to offer customers a simplified interface built on human-centered design across the entire portfolio.

Blend’s white-label application experience is accessible on many commonly-used devices. In fact, up to 60% of Blend deposit account applications come through mobile devices.

Blend helps cut out unnecessary manual entry for borrowers with an easy, single sign-on (SSO) authentication so applications are pre-populated with the right information on any digital device.

Blend’s digital account opening solutions are easy, intuitive, and helpful. For instance, answers to common questions are built directly into the process. Blend also measures how consumers interact with the application, noting where customers get stuck, in order to continuously improve the experience.

Blend allows lenders to better assess the effectiveness of campaigns by capturing consumer-entered promo codes or automatically pre-filling them through external custom marketing URLs.