Why the speed of application approvals matters

In today’s day and age, a person has many more options to manage his money. Long gone are the days that the customers are at the mercy of their banks, where the banks make all of the rules. This first started with credit unions, giving members more flexibility since every member has a stake. Now, the possibilities are expanding at a much faster rate thanks to FinTech. With FinTech growing, the traditional banking world is slowly dying and leaving its place to a banking system that gives its users more accessibility, choice, and ease of use. Users can perform all of their money management needs directly from their phones, without needing to go to a physical branch or needing to speak with someone on the phone. FinTech also paves the way for innovation in the financial space, something that has been mainly forgotten about for a long time. Just in 2021, the Financial Brand released an article showing different FinTech companies disrupting the financial space: from borderless banking to micro-lending to simply reinventing virtual cards, FinTech constantly innovates in the financial space.
All of these banking, money management, and financial tools that FinTech offers are amazing, but they are not very useful if people have a tough time becoming members or joining the bank. A big part of this is the application/onboarding process. If any business has a lengthy application/onboarding process, it can lose a significant portion of its prospects. Financial institutions are no different: the longer and tougher an application process is, the more applications will be abandoned.
It is well known that opening an account at a financial institution (bank, credit union, or other) tends to be a painful process. The annoyances caused by account opening are so well known that there have been many stand-up comedy performances explaining this very problem. Opening an account for a bank, credit union or financial institution tends to be quite annoying and requires many documents. There are mountains of data that help back this claim. A survey conducted by Deloitte University Press shows that 73% of people believe that the account opening experience could be improved. Of the people who sought improvement, 91% of them had an account opening experience that lasted more than 15 minutes, and 50% of the people had an account opening experience that lasted more than 2 days! In this day and age, as users are constantly having a shorter attention span, this is simply unacceptable.
Forbes released an article stating that the abandonment rate for online account opening is 19%, and that this number increases dramatically with the time it takes to onboard. Financial institutions are unfortunately letting go of one-fifth of their prospects, simply because they do not have a simpler and faster onboarding process in place. It is well known that the prospect acquisition cost for a financial institution is much higher than most industries: a recent survey shows that the average cost of acquiring a new prospect is $333, compared to just $7 for travel! It is therefore extremely important to take every lead as seriously as possible, and make sure that the prospect can sign up effortlessly and get approved easily and quickly, minimizing reasons to leave.
Of course, financial institutions tend to be regulated, and therefore require more overview for their new members/customers in order for them to be approved. To some degree, it is actually good that financial institutions take longer to approve an account, as there is definitely a tougher vetting process compared to a simple online account. It is therefore understandable why some financial institutions can sometimes take a few days in order to finish an account onboarding: they need to make sure that the prospect is indeed who he says he is and compliant with the laws set in place.
However, with the recent rise of FinTech, a 100% compliant account onboarding can happen in 15 minutes or less!
Thanks to the automated compliance software that exists nowadays, banks can complete all of the regulatory steps in record time. Automation means that every step needed can technically be processed in less than a minute, all that matters now is to keep the application process easy and straightforward.
The toughest step to implement tends to be KYC. KYC is an extremely crucial step, as we need to make sure that the person is actually who he says he is. There has been an increasing number of identity fraud over the past years: in 2019 alone, the FTC claims that there are over 500,000 reports of imposter scams! This makes imposter scamming (usually identity theft) the most common type of fraud that can happen to someone. Therefore, KYC must be held to extremely high standards for identity verification.
More companies are coming up with easier KYC solutions that can easily be integrated into an onboarding system. Simply uploading an ID is not enough, as that ID could be easily stolen from someone. There must be a more advanced system where people can take a photo of their ID then go through a face scan, in order to ensure that they are who they say they are. This face scanning technology already exists, and many companies can implement it in their KYC system from third-party solutions.
Sometimes, some financial institutions have all of the fancy KYC technology, however their application process is still not optimized because of bad application design. Sometimes, the KYC is good but there is no electronic signature feature. Sometimes, it is possible to e-sign but still the approval takes days. Few financial institutions have figured out a solution where they have all of the proper technology and automated compliance software needed for a fast application process and approval, easy to use and loved by everyone.
NimbleFi is a professional company that designs the smoothest, most user-friendly customer onboarding solutions. It breaks down the onboarding process in three easy steps: authentication, qualification, completion. It guides a prospect first through its incredibly speedy KYC process: upload a picture of your ID, take a picture of yourself, and voila! within minutes you will be completely verified and ready for the next step.
The next step is qualification: during this step, a prospect will fill out the necessary information in a form, which will be immediately processed in real-time so check if the prospect qualifies for the account that he is looking for NimbleFi can do credit checks and other financial services, and bundling those services with its automated compliance software NimbleFi is able to qualify applications extremely fast.
The final step is the easiest, and fastest: after the prospect is qualified, he must submit an electronic signature in order to confirm that he is signing up for the account, and that’s it! Now the prospect is successfully onboarded.
NimbleFi offers state-of-the-art onboarding solutions, where a prospect can be onboarded in 15 minutes or less! This way, financial institutions don’t need to hire any fancy technician or change their current structure; NimbleFi will take care of everything! NimbleFi can integrate its onboarding solutions to any financial institution’s current banking system, making the process smooth and seamless. Everything can be up and running smoothly within weeks! Thanks to NimbleFi, financial institutions can focus on what they know best: finance. They can leave the onboarding process system to NimbleFi, in order to ensure that they are missing the least amount of opportunities possible.