Episode 2 - Leading provider of digital financial services
In our video series Behind B2B Onboarding, we discuss and analyze digital B2B customer onboarding processes.
Episode 2 contains a breakdown analysis of the B2B customer onboarding process of a leading provider of digital financial services in Europe. Due to legal reasons we've chosen to hide the identity of this provider and instead re-create selected steps in their flow. The provider is well known as an industry innovator, who promises a swift onboarding process of corporate customers on their website.
Key takeaways
Off to a good start
The onboarding shows promise in the first few clicks, with a clean and simple design and clear message of what you get when you sign up. With simple and clear steps, you get started quickly and safely through a Google account-connected signup option, MFA through mobile phone and password creation.
Identification to find company engagements
Early on, data requirements for both personal and business information slows down the onboarding process. Personal details such as name, birth date, home address and basic company information makes up a total of 10-12 manual input fields in this case.
This could easily be improved through automated data collection and verification. Starting either with an e-identification solution or company id, leading into company engagements and basic data being collected, at least half of the fields could be removed.
"Example of onboarding flow with e-id solution and automated data collection."
A theme of manual data collection
Throughout the onboarding process there is plenty of manual data input requirements from the user. A lot of this could be collected automatically through reliable sources in the background providing multiple benefits;
- A swifter onboarding process = better CX.
- Better data quality.
- Ensuring legal compliance requirements are being met.
This is the main takeaway in the onboarding process, and it's a very common one among B2B companies today.
KYC or not?
As a provider of financial services, some data is required to be collected according to KYC and AML requirements. Some of them are addressed in the onboarding process of this breakdown analysis, but quite a few are not. The provider first and foremost needs to decide wether or not this should be required to fill in by users in this free account onboarding, or moved and supplemented to the paid version (when users want access to live products, services or data).
A free subscription onboarding that feels like a paid subscription onboarding
And while on the topic on free vs paid onboarding...
In my opinion this flow is unnecessarily complicated if you consider it a free account customer onboarding process (which I do since they don't require any billing information). Once again the provider could easily get users inside the service in a couple of clicks instead of roughly 25-30 like the case is now, should they not ask for all the data at this stage.
Summary
1. Time-consuming
As an onboarding that was promised by the provider to be swift beforehand, the process is quite disappointing. It is in fact quite time-consuming and requires a lot of data, some of which is difficult to find in certain cases.
In my opinion, the onboarding should instead be using a 'bare minimum approach' to data collection at this stage, and automate collection later on when it is required to move the account to a paid subscription.
2. Poor CX due to input fields and data requirements
The overflow of manual input fields and data entry, as well as repetitive and irrelevant questions, ruins the customer experience. It creates frustration and increases risks of churn, especially when expectations are set beforehand by website quotes.
Manual input fields also increase the risk of poor data quality, even more so as user frustration rises throughout the onboarding process. Automated data collection, verification and field pre-population could be implemented here to great effect.
