Millennials became the largest segment of the American workforce in 2016, making up about 53% of the workforce. This means they have a huge amount of economic power. Banks and financial services can expect millennials to be the borrowers and investors of the foreseeable future. This generation is the digital age. Thus, the financial services sector must find digital onboarding providers that cater to this new type of customer.
Millennials present significant challenges to banks and financial services. They are against traditional banking and prefer banking on mobile platforms. Millennials are used to personalization, choice and instant gratification. Traditional banks globally are struggling to keep up in providing a more digital experience to these customers.
Financial institutions must work diligently to win the millennial customer through more effective mobile onboarding processes. Banks must understand that millennials are not interested in sitting through the lengthy, difficult and cumbersome mobile account opening processes. Thoughtfulness must be employed to create simple, easy and straightforward processes.
Adjust Onboarding Priorities to Millennials Needs
In order to create an efficient onboarding process for millennials, financial providers must understand their needs. Millennials grew up during a time of rapid technological advancement. Because of this, they were quick to adopt changes in technology, such as the smartphone. Mobile cell phone usage has increased dramatically because of how rapidly millennials embraced smartphone technology. Smartphones allowed millennials to access the internet on the go and at any time.
Millennials were also the first generation to have immediate and rapid access to technology. Through their smartphones, millennials could gather and absorb information via Google and social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. They grew up in an age where the world shifted information into digital formats.
Because of this incredible amount of access, millennials expect a lot out of the services they use. They have no patience for companies that cannot serve their needs in a quick and efficient manner. This is especially true for financial services. If banks do not take these considerations into account during the onboarding process, millennials will quickly abandon them for other financial service providers that do address their needs.
Speed up Onboarding Times with Digital Onboarding Providers
One of the major complaints about digital financial service onboarding is that it takes such a long time. In many cases, millennials abandon mobile banking because the process takes too long. One of the key reasons for this is the complicated KYC and AML process. Many banks do not use automated identity verification tools to verify their customers, which makes the user verification process lengthy and cumbersome. Switching to an online identity verification solution and digital onboarding provider can make the verification process fast and painless for millennials. This is an obvious solution to customer abandonment which will lead to more satisfied customers.
Create Stunning User Experiences
Financial institutions must consider all the different ways that millennials may choose to become a customer. If this is through mobile, solutions are available that extract data from identity documents during onboarding and prepopulate forms. This reduces the amount of information a user must manually type into a mobile form, simplifying the form filling process and saving them time.
Thought must be put into each part of the customer journey. Not only must the user journey look amazing, but it should also feel easy and effortless for the customer to complete. Give users clear, simple instructions about each stage of the onboarding process. Also, explain to them why you are gathering their information. This will help users understand why you are asking for certain information—such as their ID during KYC identity checks—and create more user trust and retention.
Provide Omnichannel Support to Users
Millennials live in a world where they are looking at their phones for information, switch to a computer screen for something else and then go to a tablet to do something else. They have a variety of different technologies available at their disposal to perform daily tasks. This means that banks must work diligently to provide their services on a wide variety of different platforms including:
- Telephone
- Mobile
- Tablet
- Smartwatches
- Desktop
Financial services open themselves up to more customers by creating financial service platforms that work in all these different environments. They must also ensure that they are able to use the technologies embedded on each platform to perform instant identity verification to support fast onboarding times.
The Future of Financial Service Onboarding
Millennials will impact all aspects of American social, political and economic life. They will be the catalysts to redefine how companies, especially banks, do business for the foreseeable future. Financial institutions that work diligently to cater find digital onboarding providers that meet millennial needs. This will set them up to reap the rewards this large population will present in the future.
