Credit card origination cut from twenty steps to eight
A credit card issuer was struggling to hold onto their market share in a modernizing country, we built their new digital origination process on the web and in their mobile apps to onboard 10k+ customers they otherwise wouldn't be able to reach.
What the business got
Challenge
A minor card issuer player on a local market was facing shrinking of market share every year, while the population was still underbanked.
Many less tech savvy or financially interested people were just simply not reached by them, nor the competition.
After a mapping of their processes, the main reason was apparent: the length and complexity of their credit card origination process was above 20 steps.
Strategy
The approach was to bring the origination process steps down to the absolute minimum that keeps safe, risk-managed underwriting possible and automate as large portion of underwriting.
Additionally, to hook in customers by showing value early, e.g. pre-approve them in a single step, keeping the pipeline highly automate-able, e.g. excluding politically exposed persons.
Our delivery
We were engaged to build the new loan origination along a new way of delivery for the client. Their IT processes were mature, and along their most complex processes, slowing down creation with no benefits of risk management or security provided.
We:
- created a two-page website for pre-approval that doubled as the initial hook and to kickstart customers on their credit card journey,
- we implemented an 8 step (personal data, KYC, AML, payslip upload, marketing consent, signature, delivery address) process that was minutes to complete for any customer.
Outcome
The yearly target of increased new credit card origination was smashed by month 8.
The client was utilizing the same public applications in branch too for upselling with a branch worker helping the less tech savvy customers in need of a credit card.
Client testimonial
"Can we make the same for our neighbor subsidiary too?"
— client executive about scaling our efforts after clear business success.
The container architecture
With regard of future capabilities for this client, we built the first vertical with modularity in mind: the web origination and its backend decoupled from all other operational functions allowed faster iteration to experiment with the funnel and conversion rates.
Pre-approve on web was a deliberate decision to remove any friction points a new, unknown prospect would experience by downloading an application.
Switching to mobile when the prospect was already pre-approved, essentially providing a value for them already became a non-cliff for conversion rates.
Building the vertical as a simple backend, serving both part of web and mobile process kept the business logic in one place, simplified maintenance and modification, and uplifted resiliency as other parts of the apps, e.g. loan servicing could never be affected by changes in the origination.