Delight Financial Services Customers with Frictionless New Account Openings

Deposit growth is a top priority for financial institutions in 2024. Yet, attracting and retaining customers and members continues to be a challenge. Today’s financial consumers, particularly from younger generations, are comfortable evaluating their existing relationships and jumping ship if necessary.

Part of that has to do with expanded choice. Consumers have many options in financial services, from traditional financial institutions to digital upstarts like challenger and neo banks. Recent research from BAI reports that fewer than half of Gen Z and millennial consumers would give their full business to one financial provider.

Much of what drives these younger consumers to look elsewhere is the promise of a better digital experience, starting with the onboarding and account opening process, which 70% of younger consumers want to do online. Simply offering an online application option isn’t sufficient, as today’s consumer expects a seamless, fast, and convenient experience. For example, data from the Financial Brand shows that over 60% of customers will abandon an application if it takes longer than five minutes to complete.

Agreements are at the center of moments that matter

Although the importance of a seamless, convenient digital account opening process is evident, many financial institutions still struggle to optimize it in a way that meets consumer demand for a better experience while also checking all necessary compliance and security boxes. 

Many online account opening workflows are encumbered by lengthy processes, manual errors, inconsistencies in the customer journey, and disconnected systems. These factors result in a slow and disjointed front-end experience that increases abandonment rates.

Institutions need to design digital processes that support Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering (KYC/AML) compliance and mitigate the potential fraud and cybersecurity concerns inherent to the digital channel.

As financial institutions work to improve their account opening processes to balance experience, security, compliance, and connectivity across workflows and systems, agreements are a critical piece of the puzzle.

This is because agreements—whether in customer applications, disclosures, or other documents and forms—underpin the account opening process from application completion to signature and the initiation and approval of an electronic fund transfer (EFT) from another source to fund the account.

Reimagining agreements for new account openings

Creating the best account opening experience starts with optimizing agreement workflows. Financial institutions that have successfully modernized their agreement processes to support digital account opening employ a few best practices, including:

Delighting customers with dynamic, mobile-friendly application experiences

Financial institutions can delight customers and reduce abandonment through dynamic, mobile-friendly application experiences.

All new account opening forms should be presented in a clean, branded, mobile-friendly interface. All form fields should dynamically respond to the applicant’s needs based on their inputted data to eliminate irrelevant or redundant questions and streamline intake. If a signature is required, Docusign eSignature can be seamlessly integrated into the application process to ensure a smooth, uninterrupted onboarding experience.

Even if an applicant visits a branch to work with a relationship manager, maintaining a fully digital agreement experience offers significant efficiency and experiential benefits. With Docusign’s embedded and elastic signing capabilities, institutions can employ in-branch digital devices like tablets to ensure a consistent branding and user experience throughout the application process, regardless of channel.

Enhance trust with embedded identity verification

Identity verification is critical to ensure a new relationship starts well while maintaining compliance with all KYC/AML requirements. Identity verification contains multiple steps, and parts of this process can be simplified by collecting and verifying customer information earlier in the account opening process, during signing. Many in the industry use knowledge-based authentication (KBA) as a tried-and-true method, but technology improvements have driven a recent shift toward the electronic verification of photo IDs.

Using Docusign’s ID Verification solution, the applicant simply snaps a photo of their government-issued identification using the camera on their personal device. Once the ID Verification technology confirms the document’s validity, the applicant can proceed to sign the agreement. With the recent addition of Docusign’s AI-enabled Liveness Detection workflow, financial institutions can now add an extra layer of security by requiring signers to complete a quick biometric check in addition to uploading a photo of their ID. As part of the process, the AI compares the photo ID to the live video selfie for added trust and security.

Lastly, financial institutions can also choose to store verification data like legal name and address in their system of record to further support KYC/AML compliance.

Streamline operations and reduce NIGO with integrated workflows

Financial institutions can also leverage integrations and document workflow capabilities to simplify the exchange of agreements and data with third-party systems and solutions.

Docusign maintains a vast library of connectors and pre-built integrations with leading core banking, imaging, and document management systems to reduce the number of steps needed in the new account process. Users can then optimize the signing process through conditional routing for speed, control, and flexibility.

Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) is AI-powered software that streamlines and automates agreement processes. Docusign Maestro, a core platform service powering the Docusign IAM portfolio, lets financial institutions quickly build and deploy customized workflows that automate and accelerate agreement processes without writing any code. Maestro connects all workflows so agreement processes are more efficient, uniform, and visible.

Maestro allows financial institutions to combine workflow steps like ID Verification, Web Forms, eSignature, and third-party extensions to automate the agreement process end-to-end. For example, institutions can seamlessly collect data from government IDs to support downstream KYC/AML processes before customers fill out the form. They can also use this data to pre-populate the form that’s being filled, enabling a faster, easier completion experience for signers.

The institution can forgo the signature requirement for certain forms if signing isn't necessary. If applicable, they can also add conditional branch logic to support a workflow for a joint account owner.

Lastly, Data Verification helps financial institutions reduce not-in-good-order (NIGO) documents, enhance trust, and drive better customer experiences. They can verify data for select fields (like address, phone number, and account information) in real time. This is especially valuable for use cases like wire transfer forms or ACH authorizations that are essential during the funding stage for a new account. 

A modernized account opening process delivers superior benefits

By modernizing the account opening process, financial institutions can improve the customer or member experience, streamline verification, enhance regulatory compliance, and accelerate time to funding.

For example, a leading regional bank wanted to modernize its account opening process. After deploying eSignature and ID Verification, the bank successfully doubled employee productivity, delivered a straightforward customer experience, and drove significant cost savings.

“Using eSignature along with ID Verification really accelerated the account opening process,” said the VP of enterprise transformation. “We’re saving $17 per document, and our customers get a guided, straightforward digital experience. Internally, our productivity went up since we reduced the time to manage and distribute forms from an hour to 25 minutes.”

Check out our “Reducing Friction in EFTs with Real-time Data Verification” blog to learn how Docusign is streamlining the new account opening process and facilitating seamless, easy electronic fund transfers.