Small Business Bank Onboarding

A simple and trustworthy experience that balances self-service and support, empowering customers to set up their new bank account so it meets the unique needs of their business.

Role
Design Lead

Deliverables
Vision & Strategy, Research, UX, UI, Product Design

Agency
Capital One

The problem

As Capital One becomes more digitally forward, how can we create a new onboarding experience that aligns with our broader goals of engaging and building trust with small business customers?

Capital One recently launched Digital Account Opening (DAO) for small businesses, which created new opportunities while requiring a new customer engagement model. Historically, small business owners who wanted to open a Capital One account had to visit a branch, where Branch Ambassadors guided new customers through the account opening and setup processes. This time-intensive, high-friction experience limited our market, mostly to small businesses that place more value on having a relationship with their banker and are near one of our limited branch locations. DAO allowed us to expand our footprint beyond the branch, grow our deposit base, diversify our portfolio, and serve more small businesses. However, it also meant we needed a new approach to maintain and build trust with customers relying more on self-service through digital CX.

Onboarding is a customer’s first impression of their new account (and often their first impression of Capital One). This presented a massive opportunity to build trust and loyalty with our customers from the moment they log in.

The vision

Create a digital account opening experience for small businesses that balances personalization, guided support, and simplicity while also building trust in the absence of face-to-face connection.

Discover and define

I led the creation and presentation of the digital onboarding experience future product vision, securing buy-in and investment from business partners for a first-of-its-kind digital experience.

Framing the narrative

Foundational user research helped me better understand how to meet customer needs while balancing the firm's business goals.

Through a series of empathy interviews, I found that small business owners are eager to start using their accounts and appreciate a tailored experience designed specifically for them, not a generic solution.

Small business customer needs:

• A quick and easy process that allows self-service while providing support when needed.

• A business-comprehensive experience that recognizes how business needs differ from those of consumers, such as adding authorized users to the account and managing their activity.

• A relevant experience tailored to each customer.

Capital One business goals:

• Drive higher funding rates in early tenure.

• Reduce customer service calls by improving findability and accessibility of self-service features.

• Increase cross-sell product opportunities and facilitate bank switching.

Connecting the bigger banking puzzle pieces

As a design team of one, I proactively forged connections with onboarding designers outside of Small Business Bank to share learnings and determine where it made sense to align with their experiences versus creating bespoke solutions.

I facilitated an intensive two-day cross-functional workshop with product, tech, and design partners across multiple lines of business to explore and investigate how we approach account opening at Capital One. These efforts improved consistency, scalability, and efficiency across Capital One's onboarding experiences. I also led multiple working sessions with stakeholders to help me define the customer journey and collaborate on in-flight designs.

Prototype and test

I drove extensive usability testing with small business bankers, which validated earlier research and reinforced my original design vision focused on delivering tailored experiences. Customers emphasized the need for a product that acknowledges their unique business requirements while balancing autonomy and guided support.

The test participants provided overwhelmingly positive feedback, highlighting the ease of use, personalization, and intuitive nature of the experience.

“The experience streamlined the setup process for me, asked all the right questions, and it’s personalized for my business. A nice feature I haven’t seen at many other banks that offer business banking. It gives me a confident outlook on using my account.”

— Usability test participant

Results and impact

Operating under aggressive timelines and with limited resources, we shipped an MVP that met our deadline, exceeded our KPI target, and won a Capital One award for top performers.

The tight timeline reflected DAO’s planned launch in late 2023/early 2024. We wanted to meet our new customers at the door, which meant designing, building, and shipping our new experience in eight months to align with DAO.

We were successful in accelerating our development process, resulting in a September 2023 MVP pilot and full-scale launch to meet DAO in January 2024 that achieves all of our experiential goals:

• Welcomes new customers to Capital One and celebrates their business milestone.

• Ensures customers can easily perform essential account setup activities online.

• Drives early tenure funding.

• Helps customers track key moments like funding, linking external accounts, ordering and activating a debit card, and adding additional account users.

• Aligns with onboarding communications owned by our strategy and marketing partners.

• Enables customers who prefer digital engagement to remain within the digital channel.

Our MVP was a key driver of digital success, increasing new customer digital containment (keeping customers in self-service digital channels) from less than 10% to 35% annually, exceeding the business’s goal of 20%.

Other notable MVP metrics

• 49.1% click-through rate on the new welcome message, 4x higher than benchmark campaigns.

• 48% increase in early tenure task completion, improving funding rates and debit card activations.

• 51K+ small business owners gained the ability to digitally add authorized users, leading to 78% growth in invitations quarter-over-quarter and 84% growth in enrollments by the end of 2023.

• 15K+ service calls diverted due to digital debit card ordering, saving $200K annually.

• Q4 2023 TEAM Award recipient, recognizing top 10% of performers at Capital One.

Building from the ground up

After nearly two years of transforming Small Business Bank’s onboarding ecosystem, our team is leading customers into the digital era.

Built with flexibility and scalability, our initial release laid a strong foundation for ongoing innovation. The next phase—currently in development—will further enhance personalization, creating more opportunities for small business owners to tailor their accounts to their unique needs.

Through tireless advocacy for design enhancements and stakeholder investments in new technology and features, we are redefining the banking experience for small businesses. We are providing the tools and insights that enable small business owners to confidently take control of their financial journey while staying engaged and motivated along the way.