Top 4 Bank Account Opening Trends of 2018
For the past 3 years, we’ve been surveying banks across the world to understand the challenges they face with moving their account opening processes online. As a result, this survey has become the leading benchmark for bank digital transformation across the United States, Europe, and Australia and continues to help banks understand where they stand amongst their peers. In this year’s report, we’ve uncovered the 4 top bank account opening trends that financial institutions should keep in mind as they set their strategic vision for the rest of 2018 and beyond.
Growth Of Digital Sales Capabilities Is Accelerating
In 2016 and 2017, the number of banks who reached the “Digital Promised Land” for enabling digital account opening was 20% and 28% respectively. This year, we saw a jump of 51%, which highlights that banks, especially in the U.S. and Australia, have made significant investments to transform their digital customer experiences in the past 12 months.
Personal Banking Is Leading Digital Transformation Among Bank Products
According to this year’s report, personal banking digital sales capabilities jumped 69% from last year. That’s up significantly from just last year when we saw a 43% from 2016. Additionally, 57% of personal banking products can now be opened on mobile devices, which is up significantly from only 43% in 2017. Again, the U.S. and Australia are leading the way with more than double the number of products that can now be applied for digitally than just two years ago. While Europe made progress last year, it was much less with only a jump of 6%.
Mobile Is Catching Up To Desktop Digital
Last year, only 28% of all banking products could be opened on a mobile device, compared to 48% of products that could be opened digitally on a desktop computer. This year, while desktop digital has only increased to 51%, mobile has increased significantly to 42%. Personal banking products lead the way in this category as banks have seized the opportunity to use their existing personal banking apps to enable seamless onboarding.
Omnichannel Functionality Is Biggest Room For Improvement
The only area where we didn’t find progress this year was in advanced omnichannel features like save and resume. Growth has slowed for two consecutive years with only 21% growth from 2017 to 2018. It’s clear that this is an area where banks have a huge opportunity to differentiate from their competitors given how few banks have made this a priority.
