mobile
Mobile onboarding
for Revolut Business
scroll ↓
About the project
When I joined the onboarding team, we don’t have signup in the Revolut Business mobile app. As a result, quite significant number of people abandoned the mobile app after downloading it and did not proceed on web.
I designed from scratch onboarding for mobile (iOS and Android). It went live in September 2020 for freelancers and then in December 2020 for companies.
This project affected the web app as well since many changes were scaled to web and we generally moved towards the mobile-first approach. Some of my ideas scaled to Revolut for retail customers as well.
Redesigning onboarding for retail was a company priority at the time, so we worked closely on making the first part of onboarding (personal profile) clear and straightforward for retail and business customers.
Process
✍️ We started by analysing data that we had about sign up process on the Web.
We had data from analytics trackers, customer feedback from support, feedback from our KYB agents (people with legal background responsible for checking businesses documents), and user testing results.
I found 10 people owning businesses in Europe and asked them to register their businesses with Revolut on the Web in a screen-sharing video call session and summarised findings (link).
✍️ Competitor research (Monzo, Brex, Starling, N26, Coconut, Tide and others).
✍️ Sync with Revolut for retail customers to use their knowledge about customers (we have a small part of sign up in common).
Speeding up onboarding
Making onboarding smooth is the key because we can lose potential customers. We introduced a few features allowing people to skip unnecessary steps:
💡 Prefilling data from Google (address and personal details) with Google Authentification.
💡 Improving the flow for signing up with Revolut account — personal or business. This feature existed, but people find it confusing not knowing which of their accounts they are about to use and what we will do with their data. Essentially, that allows them to skip personal details and verifying identity with documents and selfies.
💡 Removing any possible manual entry of data (address, code from email and so on).
Mobile-first approach
Initially, some stakeholders were sceptical that business onboarding can fit into the mobile environment. But in the end, it worked, and many ideas from the mobile platform were scaled to the web. Onboarding on web existed for over two years and there were some legacy issues.
💡 Search address based on API data instead of manual input
💡 Inviting shareholders and directors to verify their identities (legal requirements) with a link also, not via email only
💡 Simplifying input of shareholders structure
💡 Simplifying identity verification flow
Skipping personal details
We had a feature on web allowing people link their existing Revolut account — Business or Retail — and skip entering personal details and verifying identity with selfie and a photo of a document. But we had many complaints on this one. People don’t get many things.
💡 Which accounts out of several they are suppose to use? We showed only trimmed email.
💡 Which profile we suggested for them?
💡 How to skip this linking?
On top of that, we used passcode to confirm the account for Retail only while business users also have passcode sometimes. We did not mention business name anywhere.
Simplified layout in the new design system
New layout on mobile had several major changes.
💡 Mentioning business name or using ‘personal’ label for Retail accounts instead of ambiguous trimmed emails.
💡 Split steps into two: first you select the account, then you enter the password or passcode (web only users don’t have passcodes).
💡 Giving the option to skip.
Squeezing complex flows into mobile: business owners
One of the most difficult bits of business onboarding is submitting information about business owners — directors and shareholders.
We have very complicated legal requirements, but to simplify it: we need actual people behind companies to verify their identities. Once we have a list of people owning 25% of the business (directly or indirectly), we leave the users alone. It gets complicated with nested layers: when a company is owned by another company.
It is hard to communicate what we need and make people enter only essential information, not all the insignificant shareholders. Our flow on web that was designed before I joined had lots of issues. We had complaints coming from support. When I was observing people onboarding on web, they struggled there the most.
People don’t get many things, for instance:
How many shareholders whey need to list?
What a progress bar with X% of minimum 25% ultimate control?
When adding a shareholder, you don’t see the name of the company. So when adding an owner of a company X owned by company Z you end up in a loop: which company I am talking about?
We collect up to three levels of ownership. It does not fit on mobile with a tree-like structure that we had.
I did a few iterations designing it for mobile. One had a sequence of questions framed simply, for example, ‘Is there anyone owning more than 25%?’ etc. It became clear that this will not work when we built a prototype with an actual very complex business structure: you end up in a look of questions.
The final solution is still a bit complex, but communicates which company you are adding a shareholder to and has a simpler messaging about 25% of control.
The visual below is a happy bath with some shareholders and directors prefilled from data sources we have. We try not to make people enter any information if we can, only confirm something sources from databases. But it does not always work.
Squeezing complex flows into mobile: supporting documentation
Another complex flow we have on web is supporting documentation. In 95% of the cases we make businesses upload some documentation to verify what they do. I made a separate case study to explain this flow on mobile in details: find it here. Or just have a look at the summary of what the final version looks like.
Results
It is hard to measure conversion rate specifically for mobile: we don’t have exact data for that, only overall conversion rate. Many people jump between devices, so the team measures only overall onboarding metrics. On that now, from January to March 2021 we had some positive changes:
✅ Time to onboard decreased nearly twice. It is linked with both product and operational changes (improving support processes)
✅ Onboarding rate increased 1.5 times.