Existing Vs. New Customer Account Opening

Background

Fully understanding the problem and letting customer pain points and data drive our decisions, I initially produced three design options and partnered with UX Research to conduct usability testing.

Testing showed that my initial design instincts were right. Nearly all users expected to see a sign-in button or link at the top right of the navigation bar, while some testers expected to see a prompt asking if they were a new or existing Valley customer. We’ll revisit the latter finding later, but based on user feedback and our technical limitations, we placed the sign-in button at the top right and moved forward with production.

Monitoring analytical data against our success measurements, we were surprised to see a 15% decrease in single-on usage among existing personal online banking users. In fact, 65% of existing customers were still using Plaid to fund their Valley accounts rather than making an internal transfer. That means that Valley was still incurring Plaid fees.

From a design perspective, we hypothesized that the benefits of signing in still needed to be apparent to existing customers. If they didn’t know why they should sign in upfront, why would they?

To dive into the issue further and discover alternative ways to entice users to sign in, we conducted competitive research to examine how competing financial institutions like Ally, Wells Fargo, Citizens, and others handled their online account opening experiences. Interestingly, they all asked users to identify their relationship with their bank before navigating them to the application. Most financial institutions set the expectation that existing customers will prefill their applications with information the banks have on file to save them time and effort.

Though this experience was outside of the out-of-the-box solutions framework, I took what we learned from our findings and research to create three new design options.

After another round of usability testing, option three — the more visual approach — resonated the best with testers for its eye-catching design and clear descriptions. We learned that users expected to see and read information before making a final choice. With that and a other feedback, I tweaked the design to what you'll see below.

Undergoing a comprehensive design, build, and optimization cycle produced notable and impressive outcomes for existing customers. Existing customers could now access a new deposit account application from Valley.com or the product catalog in the digital account opening platform with the option to pre-fill their application and fund internally. From a data standpoint, we saw:

• 92% of personal online banking users signed in to complete applications in July 2023 — a 42% improvement over May.
• 83% of new online accounts were funded with internal transfers, reducing Plaid links to Valley by 42% versus May.
• Online consumer conversions increased by 1.4%.
• Application completion time has improved by 1.47 minutes since May.
• The Digital Account Review team rarely received calls from existing customers regarding Plaid funding.

Lessons Learned

• Small changes can have significant impacts. 
• UX works — it’s essential to make space for the UX process and include the voice of the customer via testing, surveying, and feedback.
• Users have expectations, and meeting them where they are is critical. 
• Competitor research can inspire ideas or evoke trends, but testing to validate design hypotheses is still important.