Cracking the Code of Customer Onboarding: Improving Conversion Rates While Meeting our Compliance Requirements

What’s going on with Onboarding?

“There must be something broken for us to see this much dropoff in onboarding.”

“Our marketing campaigns won’t be efficient enough unless product fixes onboarding.”

“There have been a few changes to regulation which mean we’re going to need to add a couple new screens to the onboarding flow.”

Sound familiar? Company after company that I’ve worked with has struggled with onboarding customers. It’s the point where so many departments within a business come to a standoff, each trying to ensure their team’s objectives are met. Growth teams want to get as many new users signed up as possible.

Compliance teams want to ensure regulatory requirements are met and future remediation headaches are avoided. Product teams want to swiftly move users from the tedium of form-filling into the meat of the product experience. Exec teams want to know why their metrics aren’t improving faster.

All of this is heightened in fintech where the regulatory burden and need to ensure customer safety is so heightened.

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Stuck between a rock and a compliant place

What’s the solution? Copy changes? Better graphics? A progress bar to give the user context about where they are in the process? I’ve seen all these things help to some degree, but they’re far from a silver bullet for a product manager tasked with “fixing onboarding”.

The tradeoff at the heart of the problem is known and well established. The more steps a user needs to take to sign up, the higher the likelihood they’ll drop off before completing the process. Fewer steps = higher conversion.

But when we’re obligated to meet our KYC requirements, such a flippant answer can feel overly simplistic. Of course we’d love to onboard a user in a single click, but we need to collect a lot of datapoints about who our customers are. Growing our user base is great, but breaking the law is not.

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Best of both worlds

In a recent Volume Product offsite we dove into some key problems our customers face, trying to decide if we were well positioned to expand our offering and begin solving some more of our customers’ issues.

Once we started digging into consumer onboarding for fintechs (and all my memories of desperately trying to optimise this in previous roles came flooding back), we realised that this might be an opportunity for us to make everyone’s lives easier.

Flash forward and the result is our new One-Click Verification product. It leverages many of the same keys to success that our payment product did, but with a new aim: helping companies onboard their customers with less friction while still collecting all the data required by the compliance department. And why not help reduce fraud while we’re at it?

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One-Click Verification allows you to receive the full name, address, date of birth, and account details of a potential customer, sourced from their bank. It also gives access to transactional details to enable Source of Funds checks without the need to chase customers to send in bank statements. All of this is done via open banking, making it both extremely secure and trustworthy, as well as easy for the customer.

The same bank-detection capabilities that make Volume’s payments so quick and easy now mean that a customer can provide you with all of this in a single click.

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We’re really excited about the opportunity opened up by One-Click Verification and I believe we’ll continue to find ways to make fintech onboarding even easier in the future. If you’re interested in trying out this product, or if you just want to chat about your own struggles with onboarding please reach out.

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