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Building a Leading Consumer Digital Bank
As the design director, I led a team to design a frictionless multi-channel, multi-product onboarding experience in partnership with product, engineering and marketing.
The team decreased the digital application onboarding time from 20 minutes to under five minutes via design, new API’s, auto-decisioning (KYC) and instant bank verification.
The Situation
With a robust asset base of approximately $42 billion, Valley Bank, a regional entity, operates over 230 branches catering to both personal and commercial customers. As the bank experienced continuous growth, attracting an increasing number of customers daily, the leadership team recognized the necessity to create a seamless digital onboarding experience.
This work coincided with a large organization-wide digital transformation. Part of the transformation was hiring internal teams to deliver work like this. To accomplish this work, I built a 0-to-1 team of product designers, strategists, researchers and ops to partner with Product, Marketing, Engineering and Business Units to execute.
Key Metrics
Design Challenge
How might we create a frictionless multi-channel, multi-product onboarding experience?
Understanding the Problem
After understanding the business requirements, the team conducted a heuristic analysis along with mapping fields to business requirements so that we understood what information was required to open an account versus nice to have information.
We started here because there were two obvious reasons conversion was low.
- It took 20 minutes to complete the application.
- The application was 12 steps.
Completing a lengthy account creation form was required to even get past go.
There was a 85% drop off at step two, the online banking account creation page.
The associate experience backstage also suffered.
Valley associates touch 94.5 percent of customer applications for online banking. The risk tolerance was low for straight-through processing AND the right technology solutions were not in place.
Define
Problem Statement
We are going to provide an innovative, technology assisted account opening process in order to reduce burden on back office staff and reduce deposits for the business.
We are going to provide a seamless account opening experience in order to make it easy for our users to make their money work harder for them.
The Users
We defined the users for the digital bank taking into consideration:
- Geography
- Attitudes that drive bank selection
- Behaviors that drive bank selection
- Digital propensity
- Liquid income
Geography: Given the pure digital strategy, we broadened the focus outside the Valley customer region.
Bank selection: We knew rate shoppers would want a competitive rate without the risk of the rate changing after six months. We also knew we needed to target people that disagree the branch or branch staff relationship is important when making a selection.
Digital propensity: We knew we would be most successful with people that were already comfortable using digital channels to conduct other business.
Liquid income: Higher earners or earners with more liquidity would most likely have a greater interest in high-yield digital banking products.
Ideate
For this project, we were given a third-party solution as a starting point.
Leadership recommended the team launch with the frontend solution provided. Our cross-functional team strongly felt we could do better.
- We conducted usability testing of the out of box solution and communicated findings.
- We spoke to the engineering team to determine how expensive our recommended modifications would be.
- We presented our findings, recommendations and estimates to leadership.
By showing, not telling leadership, leadership agreed to onboard an additional resource, a full-time UX Designer, to create a new design system for account opening and focus exclusively on the experience.
This dramatically changed the outcome of the work.
Design
The team adopted a test, learn and iterate approach. The low-fidelity concepts evolved based on insights gained during the design research.
First Evolution: Setting Expectations
We learned in early phases of low-fidelity concept testing that people need clear information upfront about what they need to have nearby so they can complete the application in one session.
This module with information about what to have on hand was added. It appears after a user clicks “apply now.”
As a UI best practice, this sets the expectations before the user enters the form and creates an experience of openness and honesty.
Overall (60%) thought this screen was welcomed and people appreciated why it was there and the expectations it set.
Second Evolution: Progress Indicator
We learned 80% of users expected navigation and progress signals to be top center. This also supported mobile friendly views. So, we moved the progress indicator to top center.
Third Evolution: Organizing the Fields
We used content organization best practices to put all personal details together on one page.
The improved organization of the page alongside modern interactions and a conversational tone make it comfortable for a user to interact with the product.
Fourth Evolution: Set information in a logical, natural order
Online banking setup was moved into the account opening flow and information on next steps was refined on the confirmation page.
- 50% expected an account to be instantly approved, 50% expected a review
- A confirmation or reference ID# was widely expected along with an email
- 50% of users wanted a timeline, and felt that asking for them to create an online banking username after an account was confusing
Fifth Evolution: Put users in control
To open an account, you had to make an initial deposit. This was one of the largest drop off points in the conversion funnel. Funding with a technology partner, Plaid, was being pitched as a magic wand by the business due to the promise of instant funding of accounts.
More deposits was one of the key indicators of success.
When we conducted usability testing:
- Participants familiar with Plaid easily completed the step with no obstacles
- Participants unfamiliar with Plaid want to fully understand Plaid functionality and feel that their information is secure.
After launch, analytics showed us our hypothesis that Plaid could impact conversions was correct.
One of the first fast follows was to remove pain points created by Plaid.
Results
The team re-platformed and redesigned the account opening experience using operational and behavioral metrics to guide optimizations. The team also introduced new technologies that increased straight through processing of applications, decreasing costs and increasing conversions.
After the first six months of the relaunched experience, success metrics were:
- Reduced annual customer care costs by $88,200.
- Reduced the number of manually-processed online banking applications by 50%.
- Increased account opening conversions by 10x.
- Reduced the length of time required to open an account online from 20 to 5 minutes.
- $10M+ in new deposits
We created an experience that was simple, reducing the number of steps and simplifying the overall experience. It feels and looks visually lighter.
We created an experience that was guided, with the use of input field hints, progressive labelling and tool tips to help the customers complete tasks.
We created an experience that was friendly, using natural language to ensure the customers feel at ease and validations and expectations are met - at a human level.
Reflection
The Team
Caroline Phillips, Product Designer
Brandon Mosley, Product Designer*
Michelle Ammiratt, UX Researcher
Joel Rosado, UX Researcher
Laura Cochran, Design Director
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More than 15 Years of Experience
Over my 15+ year career I've worn many hats. The case studies in my portfolio thread the needle across my experience as a research and design practitioner and people leader.