Nordnet: Better onboarding

Online banking pioneer

Nordnet is a digital savings and investment bank headquartered in Stockholm. With 600 employees, its operations extend throughout the Nordics.

The first digital bank in the Nordics, Nordnet was founded in 1996 with the mission to challenge the financial world. And it has, being the first to digitalise stock trading. With lower costs and greater convenience, Nordnet offered customers a dramatic jump in value and more control over their savings and investments.

Nordnet understands that to achieve their goal of being the first choice in the Nordics for investment and savings, innovation is imperative. Today’s consumers have come to expect their bank to provide the same level of convenience we take for granted on e-commerce sites and other online services. To stay ahead, financial institutions have to figure out how to meet those expectations while staying in compliance with stringent regulations. And control their costs.

That’s why Nordnet is committed to building the best customer experiences by turning consumer trends and the fast pace of technology development into engaging services and products that are relevant for their customers.

Customer experience and admin load

Nordnet identified their new customer onboarding process as a crucial area of focus if they were to give their customers a truly online banking experience. The “semi-manual” process they had in place was becoming unsustainable from both a customer experience and administrative standpoint.

Customers were able to fill forms online, but then had to print, sign and post them back. Not only was the process slow, some applications were returned incomplete, taxing admin resources and leading to customer frustration. Not to speak of the number of customers who simply abandoned the process at an earlier stage.

Internally, this process made Nordnet very dependent on its administration team, and the department was simply not scalable. If the number of incoming applications increased, more employees had to be hired to handle processing all the paperwork, including scanning various documents.

Another admin challenge was managing the online forms. Assistance from the IT department was needed whenever a form needed to be edited, or if a new one needed to be digitalised.

Results

For customers, the process of opening a new account at Nordnet now takes only a few minutes. The previous process took at least a week. No more printing out agreements to sign and send back by regular mail. Everything can be done directly online at Nordnet’s website.

Nordnet’s administrators can now upload and administer digital forms, such as agreements and applications, saving significant time and internal resources.

The solution was first rolled out in Norway, for stock savings accounts (ASK). In the first 20 days of going live, the volume of processed forms quadrupled. The continued rollout met with success for retail customers in Sweden and Norway, where conversion rates rose from 30% to 65% and from 33% to 71%, respectively.

For complex B2B onboarding processes, consider the solution’s impact on Nordnet’s occupational pension sales in Sweden. 

A typical business deal involves 15-30 documents, most requiring one or more signatures. 500 such deals per year is normal, and lead times with the old process ranged from 5 days to a month, with repeated reminders needed to close the deal. Signatories could easily forget to sign a document or have questions, all slowed down by mailing times. These delays created a loop where deals could easily break down. 

The new process takes 1-5 minutes from sending the digital agreement to closing the deal.