Designing digital account opening for the US market
Individual and business onboarding, with a connected review process for bank staff.
- Market
- United States
- My work in this market
- Account opening, mortgage lending and tax files
Project brief
Opening an account involves more than an application form. Customers need to complete identity and eligibility checks, businesses need to verify their owners, and bank staff need a way to handle exceptions. I designed and built individual and business account-opening journeys for US institutions. I benchmarked 41 existing journeys, 20 for individuals and 21 for businesses, and worked from US compliance requirements to shape the application and review experience.
My role
I decided what the journeys cover and what waits for later, wrote the product requirements, and directed the AI-assisted build and its review. I worked with leadership and technical teams on what the product should show first.
- 41
- account-opening journeys at US banks, credit unions and digital banks benchmarked
- 5
- business entity types covered
- 11
- US deposit compliance requirements mapped to screens
Key decisions
- 01
Support every business structure
Some large banks send multi-owner business structures to a branch. I covered all five entity types in the digital journey, with a setting each institution can use to restrict them, because this is where a smaller institution can offer something a large bank does not.
- 02
Let each business owner verify separately
A multi-owner application should not depend on one applicant entering everyone else’s personal information. In the 21 business journeys I reviewed, I did not see a way for an owner who was not present to verify remotely. I defined a separate invitation and verification path for each owner, with access limited to their own details.
- 03
Make exceptions recoverable
I carried the application beyond submission into staff review and rework. A returned application goes to a named recipient with a reason, so the customer or owner knows what needs attention. I kept the first review model simple and left more complex approval tiers for a later stage.
Outcome
Built individual and business account-opening journeys with a linked staff-review console, backed by requirements, data models and integration specifications. The individual journey maps 11 US deposit compliance requirements to named screens.
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