As financial services go digital, customer needs and the payment methods they use are diversifying.

Zak Lambert, Product Manager at Plaid examines how to turn onboarding from a friction point to a feature that enables faster, safer payments and better service delivery.

The digitalisation of financial services has reached everyone, whether that’s seen in declining cash use, the growth of mobile commerce or new payment types such as account-to-account transactions, buy-now-pay-later and crypto. For online financial services to realise their full potential, user experiences must improve across the board. At present, people are finding too much friction in digital finance as users experience escalated authentications at checkout from merchant and bank efforts to combat growing fraud in the mobile channel and too many complex requests for additional information.

Whether it’s payments, crypto trading, banking or loans, user experiences will only be optimal when all parts of that experience work in concert. Getting user onboarding right is essential to delivering a successful experience as it provides reliable, verified data about the customer as a basis for all engagements. And that matters: the beginning of a customer relationship sets the tone for its entire life cycle.