Signicat Research Finds European Consumers’ Breaking Point for Online Onboarding

“Based on surveys of 3,500 adults across Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, and Sweden, Signicat’s report says that over half of all consumers are willing to go through an onboarding process that takes more than ten minutes.”

Europeans have a lot of patience for financial services firms’ online onboarding processes, but not as much as many banks need them to have, suggest findings from Signicat‘s “Battle to On-board III” report.

Based on surveys of 3,500 adults across Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, and Sweden, Signicat’s report says that over half of all consumers are willing to go through an onboarding process that takes more than ten minutes. But it also arrives at a definitive timestamp at which more than half of users abandon the onboarding process after 14 minutes and 20 seconds.

Signicat says that about one in three (29 percent) onboarding applications take over 20 minutes to complete; and given that 70 percent of survey respondents would have abandoned the process at the 20-minute mark, that’s not a good situation for those financial services providers.

To stay competitive with more digital- and mobile-focused challenger banks, Signicat suggests that financial institutions make better use of digital ID programs like BankID in Sweden and iDIN in the Netherlands. Biometric solutions are also an attractive option for their capability of quickly and reliably confirming the identities of users online, with Signicat reporting that 34 percent of its survey respondents said “providers are not taking full enough advantage of biometric data to speed up the onboarding process.”

For its part, Signicat is a provider of biometric identity solutions thanks to its integration of the Verimi authentication platform earlier this year; and with a growing number of other solutions on the market – many of which can match online users’ selfies to their official identity documents – financial services providers do have options to boost their performance in online onboarding’s race against time.