By Nnamdi Awili, Head Product Design, Kora
70% of customers will abandon their attempt to open an account if the digital onboarding process for an app takes longer than 20 minutes.
This means that businesses with models that involve getting customers to sign up for an account need to ensure that their onboarding process is quick, easy, and straightforward, or they’ll keep losing customers to competitors.
My team recently revamped the onboarding process enabling businesses to create accounts on Kora – a Pan-African payment infrastructure.
And we’re proud to say that we’ve drastically reduced the time it takes to set up an account with us. The onboarding process that used to take hours now takes only minutes from “Sign-up” to “Go Live.”
As we worked on upgrading the onboarding process, some things became obvious. In this article, I share three key factors that designers should keep in mind when building an efficient onboarding process for a fintech company which would benefit both the customers and the company.
Let’s talk about them,
Customer Identification
To build an efficient onboarding process, you must first determine the right amount of information you need from your customer.
Ultimately, you want to collect as much information about them as possible during the KYC process without overwhelming them.
If a user feels overwhelmed or begins to wonder why they’re being asked to divulge so much information about themselves and their business, they will most likely drop off before they’re done signing up.
Customer data must also comply with established KYC and data regulations. So you must develop those parameters beforehand with your compliance or legal departments.
When redesigning Kora’s onboarding process, we settled on what we wanted to know about our customers beforehand, such as name, date of birth, address, etc. We then matched these data against public records to verify the customer’s identity.
Automation
In most cases, setting up an account at a fintech company involves lengthy back-and-forths between the customer and the fintech’s compliance team.
This is dangerous because customers can get frustrated and move on to a competitor with a more straightforward sign-up process faster than you can say, “But why?”
To reduce the time taken by correspondence and human error from miscommunication, we automated as many parts of the onboarding process as possible.
We did this by deciding on a list of documents that different categories of customers would need to send in when signing up.
By clearly communicating these document requirements to customers and providing guidance on submitting them, we significantly reduced the time we spent collecting and verifying data.
Scalability
Scalability is essential when building an efficient onboarding process for a fintech company. Your onboarding process needs to match the demand of your growing customer base.
Achieving scalability involves the fintech company regularly reviewing its signup flows to identify useful strategies to improve it.
It also pays to invest in scalable technology you can build upon to accommodate new features and the large volume of customers flocking in.
That’s exactly what we did with Kora’s revamped onboarding process. Apart from being able to house more users, we ensured our tech stack is capable of processing more sign-up requests while staying up-to-date with the latest regulations and requirements.
That’s all, folks. If you’re a designer looking to improve your company’s onboarding process, you can’t go wrong if you focus on the things I’ve listed above. Go forth and prosper.
At Kora, our goal is to connect Africa to the world and connect the world to Africa via payments. For startups and businesses working in Africa, we provide All The Support You Need™️ to start, scale and thrive on the continent.
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