Online account opening — optimizing account creation for the 2020 consumer

Online service providers have unprecedented opportunities to drive innovation and customer experience in order to build more personal, engaging, and positive customer relationships. Benefiting from these opportunities starts with a secure, seamless and relatively quick online account opening process because, as everyone knows, first impressions count.

Trulioo has commissioned a report that gives online service providers an up-to-date view of consumer behaviors and expectations when opening new online accounts across a range of industries: financial services, retail, gaming and online marketplaces.

The report, First impressions count: optimizing online account creation for the 2020 consumer, helps online service providers learn the secrets to optimizing account creation processes that help build strong customer relationships.

Based on comprehensive research, this report details best practices for creating an online account, as seen through the eyes of the consumer. It examines attitudes to online security and highlights current frustrations around account creation. Most importantly, it reveals widespread acceptance of the need for security and identity verification checks when opening new accounts of all types, and the trust that robust processes for security and identity verification engender among customers.

The report provides useful insight for online service providers that want to attract, onboard and build lasting relationships with new customers in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (U.S.). While there are differences in consumer expectations and preferences for online account creation across different categories — financial services, retail, gaming and online marketplaces — the research highlights the broad truths which are applicable across all sectors.

Demand for digital services continues to soar

Consumers are switching to online services to carry out tasks in all aspects of their lives — whether that’s shopping, banking, booking tickets and accommodation, or betting on sports matches. For consumer-facing businesses across all sectors, this demand for more online services represents a massive opportunity to drive revenue and margins despite a turbulent and uncertain economic picture.

However, the increased use of online services also poses new threats and risks for businesses, as bad actors look for new methods to commit fraud and launder money. Online service providers find themselves under ever more pressure to ensure that they are protecting their customers at all times on their websites and mobile applications. This protection means collecting and managing personal data in a secure and compliant way, and guarding against identity theft.

The need to properly balance seamless digital experience with protecting customer data and identities is most critical during the account creation process. But account opening is also the time when service providers need to verify the identity of the individual to protect against fraud. They need to run checks, but they need to make the process as smooth and easy as possible for the new customer, or they risk losing him or her forever.

When developing strategies to find this balance between customer experience and security during account creation, business leaders need to understand their customers — their worries, expectations and drivers when using online services.

Optimizing account creation

The report is designed to help educate online service providers how to refine their customer onboarding strategies to optimize account creation. In doing so, they can deliver a first-class customer experience which forges trusted and lasting relationships with new customers. Topics include:

• Understanding the account creation balancing act
• Analyzing demand for new online services
• Examining consumer attitudes to account creation
• Defining the optimal account opening experience
• Considering the reasons for abandonment
• Investigating consumer attitudes to identity verification
• Discovering consumer appetite for real-time identity verification
• Building seamless account creation

In an ever-more competitive digital economy, brands in all sectors must work harder and invest more to attract and engage new customers. Losing customers and their revenue potential during the account opening process, before they’ve even had an opportunity to use and engage with a service, is a challenge facing all online businesses.

For online brands and consumers alike, account creation really is crunch time.