The Challenge
The digital business onboarding processes currently available to regional banks and credit unions are fraught with hurdles and stumbling blocks. Lenders are challenged to provide high-quality customer experiences while maintaining their market positioning and staying true to their brand. Customers need trust, transparency, accessibility, and high-level engagement. In order to achieve industry standards for digital onboarding, banks are often forced into tradeoffs, sacrificing streamlined ease of use for technical adherence or requiring extensive employee time to review and supervise processes that could otherwise be reliably automated.
With years of real-world banking experience, PXD is uniquely situated to provide solutions to these challenges. Our involvement in the quickly developing digital banking sector has helped us identify some common pain points in customer and business onboarding for lenders:
- Banks relying on time-consuming and confusing applications that frustrate good customers
- Banks attempting to replicate branch compliance rules
- Banks suffering high application abandonment rates while wasting money on marketing, CIP and fraud checks, third-party data sources, and ineffective customer outreach
- Banks hamstrung by slow legacy services, processes, and outdated policies
- Manual review of applications remains largely unavoidable, negating some of the primary benefits of digital automation
Sound familiar?
The good news is we’ve had major success overcoming these challenges and generating solutions for super-community banks and lenders. Let us show you how.
PXD has crafted solutions for:
In collaboration with these organizations, PXD has re-imagined consumer and small business onboarding for deposit accounts, loans, and credit cards while automating the provision of innovative business banking services.
Every financial institution has unique challenges that naturally lead to different market goals and product processes. By stripping away the traditional approaches to handling new customers, PXD has been able to universally categorize and address pain points while developing a playbook for widespread improvement.
We designed Lorem Bank to showcase and demonstrate our system.
Hypothesis:
By creating a brand-neutral digital onboarding process, PXD demonstrates the value of a core-agnostic approach to digital banking that is compliant, complete, frictionless, and attractive to customers. Our shareable product flows allow PXD to provide clear examples of the value of experience-first design while allowing banks to understand and test how these solutions could be applied to their specific goals.
The Method
PXD targeted flows that would apply to most financial institutions and got to work.
We created “Lorem Bank” as our stand-in, brand-neutral financial institution, designed from the bottom up to be fully and rapidly customizable to fit any bank’s unique logo, fonts, colors, customer experience promises, history, and overall brand experience goals.
PXD leveraged its in-house design methodology to define the problem, arrive at a hypothesis, and build a testable product that satisfies requirements. This procedural approach promotes fast cycles and a highly iterative path to arrive at design solutions.It looks like this:
Our development vision is driven by collaboration, allowing us to draw on the strength of your team’s experience building banking solutions, now working hand-in-hand with our designers. Co-creation of product workflows allows banks to have detailed involvement with their product generation while maintaining tight compliance standards. These solutions function less as launched acquisition products and more as true platforms for the bank to develop and launch more expansive and profitable future digital products.
We’ve learned valuable lessons along the way. If you want to make your onboarding stronger, faster, and better then:
"Be critical of everything" - PXD 2024
Sounds healthy, right?
What we mean here, is that the value you will gain and the time you’ll save for your new customers comes from challenging every screen, agreement, document, point of information, checkbox…, everything. Because every time you find something that can be eliminated, or reorder information more naturally and in context, it leads to a better experience for your client. So, let's get to the goods..
Execution:
PXD set the bar high to design a process that ensured digital businesses could accomplish everything they needed to open new accounts as efficiently as regulation allowed.
We conducted deep dives into operational procedures, compliance policies, digital fraud mitigation, and streamlining legacy processes so that digital became a channel aligned with the successful traditional operations and not an independent operating unit. Focused on relieving crucial pain points, we eliminated paperwork, manual processes, and anything unnecessary that wasn't bolted down.
For broad and collaborative projects like this to be successful, communication is everything. In this case, we’re covering everything from top-down processes to 3rd party integrations, all the way down to pixel widths. That requires the creation of three key artifacts.
Results
PXD arrived at a UX that was dramatically lower-friction and more efficient than typical homegrown processes or off-the-shelf digital onboarding products. Financial institutions that have applied elements of these processes have enabled users to onboard in under half the time, increasing the number of successful applications, avoiding abandonment, and gaining positive client feedback from their first interaction with their new bank.
So, let's go back to some of those core issues we wanted to address. In the case of Lorem Bank:
- There’s no downtime while applying. We removed manual reviews and moved any that remained to the end of the application process.
- Consolidated inputs. Pages and information entry fields have been reduced to critical information. If you want additional customer info, ask for it after they have an account…
- It takes a remarkably short amount of time to open an account. Realistically, an applicant can complete the process in less than two minutes. And yes, we’ve achieved this before on live products. Check out our prototype and see for yourselves.
Conclusion
Successful digital onboarding is about making things easier for customers and team members, improving the bank’s processes and performance, and creating pathways to new market segments. PXD’s analytical and collaborative approach drives learning, iteration, and capacity growth without unnecessary process overhead, technical debt, or valuable client-staff time. Efficient, clear user experiences that respect an applicant’s time lead to higher conversion rates, customer retention, support cost reduction, and enhanced brand perception.
We encourage banks to think outside of their existing processes and results, simultaneously working with their customers to achieve both near and long-term goals. Banks gain capacity in deposit-gathering or lending, service delivery or outreach, and efficient customer service.
This process works and can work for you. Click the link to view our product documentation for yourself.
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