🗯️ Challenge

In a startup, offering investment opportunities to its customers, one of the key challenges is the customer onboarding process due to the high level of regulation in the financial industry. For example, it is legally required to properly identify (KYC) and validate (AML) each customer before presenting them with the details of an investment offering.

🎯 Goal

Improve the onboarding process to be a simple, seamless, efficient, and exciting experience for the users by encouraging them to complete the KYC and AML processes.

Research

Stakeholder interviews

In this step, I would usually start with talking with stakeholders or Product owners to identify the feature requirements and the business goals, understanding what is the core value prop of the offering, and identifying who are the users of the platform, and who are the main competitors.

Some questions:

1. How would you, personally, define success for this feature?
2. What worries you about the the onboarding process development?
3. What things do customers complain about or ask for most often, and why?
4. Do you have any ideas on how can we improve?

Competitive benchmarking

After that, I would analyze the competitors and research how do they solve common problems, and analyze existing user feedback from online reviews or social media channels.

I did a look at the European challenger's banks such as Monzo, N26, Revolut, Atom, Starling, and Monese full in-app processes, which make account opening almost instantaneous. I found the following methods been used:

• Video call verification and verify the registered ID and phone number.
• No identification for customers below a certain amount of transaction eg €250
• Verification based on address, geo location and other data points to verify the information provided by the user.
• Voice and facial recognition security or PIN security
• Perform some background check on the user's bank account