Many Financial Institutions Nail KYC, But Lose Customers at Enrollment

By Alexandros Argyriou, CEO at Fintech Insights

Published on June 27th, 2025 in Customer Experience

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Executive Summary

Enrollment is the overlooked half of onboarding. While banks prioritize KYC, many ignore the friction-filled enrollment process that can drive abandonment and damage trust.
Redundant steps, excessive manual input, poor navigation and weak UI design are the main culprits complicating digital banking enrollment.
Streamlining workflows, using autofill, clarifying navigation and enhancing UI can significantly improve user experience without compromising compliance.

It’s well documented that many banks get KYC wrong — often with costly repercussions.

But what about enrollment: the other, equally important part of customer onboarding? Where do banks typically fall short? And what steps can they take to improve the process?

Here’s what the data from our digital banking research platform FinTech Insights says.

What is Enrollment?

For the purposes of our research, we’ve considered enrollment to be the stage of the onboarding process the customer must complete to access online banking: creating login credentials and/or authentication.

Our dataset includes 23 U.S. incumbents, challengers and credit unions with a clear, well-defined enrollment process that takes place during or after KYC.

Having analyzed how each firm handles enrollment, we’ve pinpointed five critical issues that cause needless friction and make the process harder than it has to be.

1. Redundant steps

The single biggest takeaway from our analysis is that compliance doesn’t justify lengthy, cumbersome processes.

All 23 firms in our dataset operate in the U.S. and, so, must largely follow the same rules. And yet, enrollment workflows differ dramatically.

Capital One, Wells Fargo, and Space Coast Credit Union have a four-step process:

Type username (or member number, in the case of Space Coast)
Type password (Space Coast asks for the account number)
Confirm password (Space Coast asks for the customer’s social security number)
Tap continue or submit

At the other end of the spectrum, a credit union from California has 46 steps, including two instances of off-platform activity.

Capital One, Wells Fargo, and Space Coast Credit Union only have four steps because they don’t ask users for information which they’d already collected during KYC.

But even where firms prefer to have a more comprehensive enrollment process, there are still viable ways to pare things down.

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Consolidating related steps — for example, collecting all personal details in one go — is a quick win and relatively easy to implement. Alternatively, certain steps can be optional or skippable. This is a common technique across our dataset, which highlights its feasibility.

Dig deeper:

2. Avoidable manual input

The more information a user must enter manually, the greater the perceived effort. And yet, 73.9% of institutions in our dataset have enrollment processes with 10 or more steps, the bulk of which involve data input.

That’s a huge amount of unnecessary friction. It’s very possible to streamline without making compromises.

Pre-fill and autofill technologies enable the system to pre-populate as many fields as possible with information already on file or stored on the user’s browser.

Case in point, if the user types their social security number, their remaining personal details could be pulled using autofill, eliminating several fields.

Even where typed input is unavoidable, it can still be streamlined. Name and surname fields, for instance, can easily be consolidated into one. Address fields can be similarly condensed into fewer fields. For example, one field for house number, street, city and zip code.

3. Convoluted navigation

Do the steps follow a logical order? And is it clear what users must do next after completing a step?
Needless to say, evaluating intuitiveness (or the lack of it) involves a certain degree of subjectivity. But you can’t go too far wrong if you follow these best practices:

Keep the number of interactions (action steps, e.g. clicks, taps, etc.) required to move from one step to another to an absolute minimum
Ensure each step and call-to-action are clearly signposted.
Include progress indicators. This can be especially effective on longer workflows, because knowing how many steps remain removes uncertainty and, so, makes it less likely that the user will perceive it as “too long” and get frustrated.

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4. Poor presentation

Humans are visual — 30% of the brain’s cortex is dedicated to vision, compared to 8% to touch and 3% to hearing. So, the way information is presented impacts UX just as much as the overall workflow.

Key information should be prominently, clearly and concisely displayed, so users can understand it easily and aren’t overwhelmed. Interactive elements such as accordions — where the user can expand sections to get more information — can help remove visual clutter and keep things streamlined.

5. Asking for additional information without explanation

With online fraud on the rise — 26% of American adults have been victims of bank or credit card fraud, according to YouGov — consumers are increasingly hesitant about sharing personal information.

So much so that FinCEN, the U.S. Treasury’s financial crimes enforcement network, has proposed banks should only collect part of customers’ social security numbers.

While this proposal is still at consultation stage, it highlights another important principle of good UX.

It’s not enough to put robust security measures in place. It’s best practice to explain what those security measures are in clear, simple language. And it is just as important to explain why this information is required, particularly for sensitive data like social security numbers.

The Pew Research Center found most Americans feel they don’t have control over their personal data and how it’s used. So, a thorough explanation and assurances can go a long way towards gaining trust.