Customers keep using apps for several reasons, including speed, design, and intuitiveness — the app, after a while, “gets” them. Of course, not everyone is a designer or programmer with mobile app experience, but most consumers are unaware of the systems, servers, databases, languages, platforms, frameworks, and networks — the technology stack — that go into developing, delivering, and maintaining an app.
Even if they do not know what goes on under the hood or behind the scenes, though, one thing they can all agree on: It needs to work, seamlessly, without friction, delays, or inconveniences. This also extends to mobile banking apps. In fact, according to the consulting firm Deloitte, 38% of customers say that the user experience is the most important factor in choosing a bank.
While digital onboarding intends to make signing up for a new financial app simpler and more convenient, it’s still a critical component of the customer journey. Additionally, the process must not take too long or impose friction, or else the bank risks the new customer abandoning the process altogether. That customer might simply return to their existing banking app or explore others.
Unfortunately, with rampant fraud growing exponentially, banks and financial institutions must ensure that their onboarding processes remain compliant with government and industry standards, ensuring that the new customers they are onboarding are not fraudsters.
5 Technology Integration Steps for a Seamless Customer Onboarding Process
Let’s look at five ways that banks can avoid using multiple platforms for fraud and instead focus on fully integrating their customer onboarding processes.
1. Use Onboarding as Part of Your Marketing and Messaging Campaigns
Instead of portraying customer onboarding as an inconvenient “necessary evil” in the account creation process, banks can leverage onboarding to their advantage. Through videos, tutorials, pop-ups, and other marketing content, banks can not only demonstrate the ease of onboarding but also explain why it is necessary for customer security and privacy.
In an age of fraud, it’s not just banks that need to protect themselves, but consumers as well; knowing that a bank is taking onboarding seriously helps reassure new customers about the security culture of the bank.
2. Integrate Onboarding With Traditional Identity Verification Procedures
Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) are well-known procedures in the banking community. Essentially sophisticated background checks, KYC and AML enable banks and other financial institutions to verify that a customer wishing to open an account is indeed who they say they are and not a criminal.
Digital customer onboarding is a newer process, and even if outsourced, it needs to be fully integrated into these incumbent procedures. Neobanks that have partnerships with larger, established banks need to ensure that their digital onboarding procedures integrate with the verification processes of those banks.
3. Train the Contact Center
Self-onboarding should come as no surprise to consumers accustomed to a world that constantly requires us to DIY and figure things out on our own.
However, confusion and frustration can still occur. Banks need to train their customer-care representatives on customer onboarding procedures if new customers — if they have not abandoned the app out of frustration — need some hand-holding in the account-opening process. While automated chatbots and a searchable database of FAQs can help, new customers need to know that help is available, whether via text, chat, phone, or another channel.
These customers technically aren’t customers yet — they’re just in the process of signing up — but onboarding is a critical component of the overall customer experience.
4. Seamlessly Integrate With the Existing Technology Stack
Further to the point of creating an intuitive, frictionless experience, onboarding processes need to be seamlessly integrated into the existing technology stack. Customers need not know about all of the existing systems and services that deliver the app to their device. Even if the onboarding service is outsourced, a new customer should be onboarded in the shortest time possible without too many inconvenient steps in the process.
The IT team, including security analysts, should be heavily involved in integrating onboarding processes to make recommendations for a stronger and safer experience.
5. Get Finance Involved in Onboarding
Financial institutions need to preserve capital to be able to write off losses when they occur. Instnt, the first fully managed customer-onboarding service, is the only provider that offers contractual guarantees of fraud-loss indemnification of up to $100 million. In this manner, banks can shift fraud losses off of their balance sheet with insurance indemnification.
Finance, to gain some visibility into these losses, should be able to see when a customer was onboarded and when any fraudulent or negative account behaviors began.
Instnt’s Onboarding Solutions
Instnt AcceptTM is the only customer acceptance service that provides performance guarantees for each good customer a bank accepts. Because Instnt AcceptTM assumes liability for fraud, banks can experience growth like never before without any of the negative effects of widening their sales funnels. For more information on Instnt’s innovative solution to an age-old problem, start your free demo today.