Retail bank cuts onboarding time by 50% with redesigned mobile journey

Stripping back and streamlining digital account opening

‘We always want to build the best solution for any given problem’, says Zühlke UK Principal Business Consultant, Rasha Hamdan.

‘We don't just think about what the best way to do something is from an engineering or delivery perspective; we also try to understand the entire journey. We want to find the sweet spot between having something that's great for the user while also being sustainable, technically efficient, and delivering real business value’.

To that end, our work on this project began by fully auditing the existing technology and processes. The client already had a technical platform in place for its banking app, so our role wasn’t to reinvent the wheel, but instead to learn what could be improved within that framework.

Zühlke’s Head of Financial Services, Maurice Roach, explains how this auditing happened from both a technical and a customer-centric point of view at the same time:

‘The process was one of walking through the retail bank’s existing workflow to really understand – and pick apart – what they wanted to offer. That meant identifying wins in terms of how we could slice delivery, and where we could improve the whole system.

‘Understanding the problem, scoping the environment, scoping the request and what the need from both the client and the customers were’, says Maurice, ‘is how we were then able to reshape things and produce an Alpha build. That was effectively a skeleton showing the bare minimum needed for the onboarding journey, to prove that this was actually going to work’.

Crucially, this involved stripping the customer onboarding process back to its bare bones without skipping over the all-important legal nuts and bolts:

‘Because banking is a highly regulated environment’, Maurice says, ‘it reduces your ability to release software in stages, as you might do in another sort of digital product company. There’s an end-to-end need here that meant it was impossible to ship parts of this update until the whole thing was done’.

Stable engineering, built for the long term

The newly updated mobile banking app is able to take customers from their phone’s app store to opening a new account in just 10 minutes – while still ticking off all the relevant checks and legal requirements.

Through careful auditing, the team at Zühlke was able to reduce the number of steps and questions by 39% and bring everything in-app, removing the need for any phone or SMS-based ID verification.

What may seem to the end user like a simple redesign was, in truth, no small task – and one that could only have been achieved through an environment of close collaborative working, as Maurice explains:

‘We were deeply entrenched with our client’s product and compliance folks, but that's only possible when you start talking early on and frequently about what they actually need and how we can make things better for customers.

‘It's about seeing how consumers are engaging with the app first-hand', he explains, ‘and having technology and product working hand in hand together. That’s the way things should always happen, but sometimes it’s a tough challenge in large organisations’.

Importantly, this project took on a modular approach, where functionality can easily be added, removed, or even duplicated and adopted by other bodies within the client’s group.

‘For us, this is all about how you build really stable engineering for the long term’, Maurice explains. ‘So that’s not just how you build within a regulated environment, but also how you ensure that quality, stability, and agility are baked right in.

‘That's part and parcel of what we do’.

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