What Are the Items to Consider When Working on a Digital Account Opening Initiative?

In order to better predict and decide whether a digital account opening initiative will provide the returns and results you seek, there are several items to carefully consider before moving forward. Here are five of the most important aspects your new digital account opening solutions must include:

Showing Offers to Prospective Clients

A great digital account opening solution will show your best offers to prospective clients in an easily accessible and digestible way. This means creating attractive visuals that can be quickly scanned to identify the key details of each offer. It’s also important that your solution makes it easy for prospects to compare multiple offers side-by-side so they can choose the one that best meets their needs.

Engaging Clients in Easy-to-Use Onboarding Process

Along those same lines, you also want your onboarding process to be simple and straightforward to complete. Clients will look for any reason not to pursue opening an account, as they likely already have dozens of other tasks they need to do. If the onboarding process looks like it will take far too long to complete, they might close out of the browser and tell themselves they'll do it later, or they might just look for a different institution that offers a smoother process to open an account.

When looking at onboarding processes, test the user experience before you commit. Obtain feedback to learn what the process was like, how long it took, and so on. The answers to these questions can help you narrow down which information is essential to open an account without being too overwhelming for the client.

Ensuring You Have Scoop-Up Triggers When Prospects Abandon

Most financial institutions that offer digital account opening will often see many prospective clients begin the process of opening a new account digitally, only to never fully complete the process. This can occur for many reasons, and it's not necessarily a sign that your digital opening system is faulty. At the same time, you should absolutely have a trigger in place that leads prospective customers back to the account-opening process when they abandon it.

This could be in the form of app notifications, emails, or text messages that simply say, "We noticed you haven't completed opening your account" with a convenient link back to the sign-up form. This can significantly impact the number of people who follow through and complete the sign-up process.

Bringing Prospects Back into the Flow

When your scoop-up triggers work as they should, they'll bring prospective clients back to the exact spot they left off. If your scoop-up triggers instead directs them to a page where their previous progress was not saved, prospective clients are likely to give up and look elsewhere. Instead, ensure that your sign-up process saves their progress at logical points, which allows them to log back on and finish what they started without the hassle of re-entering information they already provided.

Giving your clients a sense of ease and flow as they complete their digital account opening journey makes them far more likely to actually open an account. By focusing on getting your prospects back into the flow, you could see a major spike in sign-ups from people who previously started but abandoned their account opening process.  

Having Detailed Analytics on the Prospect's Digital Journey

Finally, your digital account opening process should collect data throughout the entire sign-up process.

This might include the following:

• How long it takes clients to finish the form, start-to-finish
• How far clients get in the sign-up process before closing out
• The demographics of people who tend to finish the sign-up process versus those who don't
• The percentage of people who complete the form in one sitting versus those who come back and complete it later

By collecting data of this nature, you can then make small tweaks over time to make improvements to prospective clients' digital journeys. It can take quite a bit of time and effort to get your digital account opening system exactly where you want it to be, but by collecting data and making small improvements over time, you're sure to eventually reach the optimal system for your business and your clients.

Ensuring a Compelling User Experience for Prospective Clients

The field of user experience, or UX, is finally getting the recognition it deserves for helping businesses in all sectors onboard clients more quickly and easily, while preventing customers from getting overwhelmed. User experience involves all kinds of design elements that can make your sign-up forms more attractive and friendly, but it also involves collecting just enough data to get the job done without making the process exhausting.

When it comes to digital account opening, there are numerous ways you can enhance the user experience for your prospective clients. This includes:

• Doing a KYC pre-check in the background: This allows your clients to see if they're eligible for an account before they even start the sign-up process.
• Getting all the corporate information for checking KYC for a commercial client: This can be done by integrating with a company registration API, which will automatically populate the form with the relevant information.
• Using Robotic Process Automation to make it easy for the prospects to submit documents or other information when and how they want: By automating the process of submitting documents, you make it possible for your clients to do so on their own time and in a way that's convenient for them.
• Using automated triggers and notifications to make it easy on the prospects: For example, sending a notification when their information is received and processed. This can help to alleviate any concerns they may have about the security of their personal data.

Getting All the Data into the Core System

One of the major reasons to overhaul your onboarding system and make the transition toward digital account opening is that digital account opening can allow you to collect numerous data points that automatically go into the core system. The most effective digital bank account opening systems funnel all the data collected into your core system.

This allows your institution to keep every client's data in one place, which provides many important benefits. For starters, a centralized location for data allows your staff to pull up client information much faster, as the data is better organized. It also helps to keep data more secure, as your staff won't have to worry about keeping physical files secure and out of reach in the office. Finally, it gives you the ability to handle more clients than ever, which gives you more room to grow as a business.

Using a core data system comes with pros and cons, but it offers an opportunity for businesses like yours to provide better and faster service to your existing and future clients.

The ROI for Digital Account Opening

According to Novantis Strategy & Management, the average lifetime value of a banking customer at a large institution sits between $2,000 and $4,000. For smaller financial institutions, the figure is closer to $10,000!

Clearly, by investing some resources into making your digital account opening process easier, your company stands to make huge financial gains by obtaining and retaining new customers.

Get in Touch with Cotribute Today!

Digital account opening has been around for quite some time, yet many banks and credit unions still don't offer a streamlined path for customers to open new accounts online. This can send prospective customers to big banks that offer these highly convenient tools, forcing you to work much harder to obtain new clients and maintain your existing ones. At Cotribute, we help you compete against the big banks by offering a suite of digital account opening tools that are designed to be user-friendly and efficient. Our powerful tools and analytical software can help organizations like yours operate more seamlessly than ever, and our software allows clients to input their own information for a more streamlined account opening process. If you'd like to learn more about how we can help revamp your digital account opening process, please contact us today for a free demonstration!

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