With tons of FinTech apps available, your onboarding process is one of the best ways to make a first impression. Modern customers have higher expectations, and with Fintech, up to 24% of apps are uninstalled due to a bad first impression.
Hence, you need to incorporate the best customer onboarding practices to help users set up your app successfully and get maximum value.
What is Fintech Onboarding?
FinTech onboarding is the process of welcoming and making new users familiar with your product or service. This means supporting new customers as they navigate through your app or website by providing personalized guidance and features that encourage them to complete the process.
Onboarding customers in FinTech is like the typical onboarding process in most industries, except with the extra complexities of navigating security concerns and financial regulatory requirements. With an easy and smooth FinTech onboarding process, you can consistently boost conversion and retention rates, with customers assured that they have made the right choice.
Importance of FinTech onboarding process
One of the biggest benefits of an amazing FinTech onboarding process is reducing customer churn. Great onboarding unlocks user trust as they are satisfied with their first interaction with your platform. With smoothly implemented security measures alongside a seamless KYC check, you can foster trust that makes users feel valued.
You can also eliminate frustrations through targeted tutorials and guides with clear instructions that improve the overall experience. Ultimately, the churn rate is low as users are motivated to complete onboarding and use your product long enough to gain significant value.
Best practices for onboarding customers in FinTech
Here are key ways to create a great onboarding process:
Centralize the onboarding documents for self service
Self-services eliminate the need for users to contact customer support at every stage of the onboarding journey. Automation and centralization with a tool like Payline help customers get the information they need on demand, ultimately eliminating friction.
You can automate tooltips to explain complex processes when a user interacts with them for the first time. Integrating specially prepared API documentation gives users access to important information in a few clicks.
Simplify the account setup process
A simplified account setup process is the first step towards ensuring a seamless customer onboarding process in FinTech. Too many steps can be tiring and discouraging for new users.
Request the bare minimum data necessary for registration and gradually ease the user into the process without making it overwhelming. This would enhance the overall user experience and encourage high customer adoption.
A key way to implement this is to leverage automation techniques that allow customers to complete the account setup process in record time. With pre-filled forms, you can save time and minimize confusion.
PayPal, for example, reduces friction during the account setup process by simplifying the process in only a few steps. First, they have minimal input fields during signup where users input an email address, password and phone number to avoid unnecessary details.
The onboarding flow is seamless, with real-time user identity verification and one-click sign-ups through integrations with Google and Facebook accounts.
Provide personalized onboarding Journey
Find out the user’s main goal before you begin the process of onboarding customers in FinTech. This helps you tailor the onboarding journey to your user’s specific needs. This should be a priority for FinTech apps with multiple use cases.
According to The Financial Brand, 64% of consumers are likelier to use a fintech product offering a personalized onboarding experience.
Fintech brands can increase customer satisfaction and retention by leveraging data-driven insights to offer personalized recommendations and services. Gather relevant data about the customer’s risk tolerance level, preferences, goals, and financial targets to lend a personal touch that fosters trust and loyalty.
PayPal tailors its onboarding journey to every user’s needs, whether it’s shopping or money transfer. It does this through a welcome screen that helps to identify the user’s main goal. After learning the user’s intention, the next set of screens is personalized based on the customer’s response, thereby creating a successful personalized onboarding experience.
Automate the KYC and AML screening process
All financial institutions need to implement Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-money Laundering (AML) checks to meet up with regulatory requirements. These checks are legally required to prevent the illegal use of global financial services. However, a thorough check of all documents can be stressful without automation.
FinTechs can simplify this process by using automation to streamline identity verification procedures. Of course, it’s important to request only necessary information and explain to customers why this is necessary. Analyzing logs or keeping records of logs is helpful for financial audit purposes and ensures transparency and accountability in compliance checks.
In this case, you can also mirror the PayPal approach of customer self-service. Their system can automatically verify identification documents, thereby making the KYC process faster and reducing the need for manual oversight. It also integrates with financial databases to automatically screen new users for any AML issues or sanctions.
Optimize the onboarding journey for mobile
About 60% of global internet usage is through mobile devices. That means a significant number of customers access FinTech apps via mobile devices. It’s important to optimize the onboarding journey for this category of users by making the app user interface as mobile-friendly as possible. This includes optimizing everything from the signup screen to various other interfaces.
It’s great to break your layout into steps, but ensure there are not too many. Show only the necessary steps and display progress visually to update users on how close they are to being done. Also, limit how much typing a user has to do by adding modifications such as a different input keyboard for numbers and text fields.
PayPal’s mobile-responsive design offers the same functionality for both mobile and desktop versions. It also includes step-by-step instructions and push notifications, which are the perfect in-app guidance to make it easy for users to complete KYC verifications and other onboarding steps via mobile.
Monitor the onboarding metrics and improve
How do you know that your onboarding strategy is successful? Feedback gives you an accurate idea of what your users are thinking, rather than relying on guesses. Conduct customer surveys to identify common pain points during onboarding and make changes based on this feedback. It would be best if you also watched out for some key onboarding metrics that give detailed data insights.
This includes the time-to-value, which measures the time it takes new customers to ascertain that they have gotten value for your product or service. Of course, the churn rate is also super important.
This refers to the percentage of customers who stop using your product over time. With great onboarding techniques, you can reduce churn and instead increase the adoption rate, which is the percentage of users who actively use your product or service.
Conclusion
In the FinTech world, customer loyalty is king, and the onboarding process is the foundation for building long-lasting relationships with a diverse customer base.
By adopting these best practices, FinTech companies can make customer onboarding impactful, stress-free and engaging.
