No potential bank customer wants to be greeted with a stack of paper when signing up for an account.

So USAlliance Federal Credit Union decided to use mobile devices to enroll new customers at its bank.

A consumers who comes into the branch can use a bank-supplied tablet to take a picture of her driver’s license, and the tablet then automatically fills in many of the required information fields. That speeds up the new customer application processes, says Kevin Randall, senior vice president and chief information officer at USAlliance. This new feature is also available on the bank’s mobile site and in app, so consumers outside the branch can sign up with their smartphones.

USAlliance decided to invest in this new technology, which it rolled out in June, to aid its mobile customers, who often don’t complete forms online because there are too many steps, Randall says. Once a customer takes a picture of his license, the software fills in his name, address, date of birth, driver’s license number, and state that issued his license.

In a survey of 100 banks between 2013-2015, 80% of consumers who started to enroll for a bank account on a smartphone or tablet abandoned the process before completing it, says Paul Mackowick, vice president of sales at Gro Solutions Inc., which provided the technology for USAlliance. Gro is owned by Mobile Strategy Partners LLC, a financial industry service provider.

“We felt it was important to allow customers to start a relationship with USAlliance on mobile,” Randall says.

The new feature is available on USAlliance’s mobile website and in its app. Besides opening a new account, a customer can also use the license feature to speed up the process of applying for a loan or a new credit line.

“We didn’t want to be in the way of members deciding to use [the mobile] platform exclusively,” Randall says. 82% of USAlliance’s customers that use mobile banking have signed into their account within the last 90 days, which is higher than the 56% of desktop bankers who signed into their account within the past 90 days. USAlliance launched its native Android and iOS apps a year ago, and the bank says the app averages 1,000 downloads a month, across all the apps.

USAlliance  is testing the license-scanning system at six of its 24 branches, with each branch having one or two iPads available. The bank and hopes to roll it out to all locations soon, says Kristi Kenworthy, assistant vice president of e-commerce for USAlliance. Having a digital enrollment feature at the branch also eliminates work for employees, who previously would input manually all of the data submitted by a new customer.

USAlliance also slimmed down the number of questions it asks consumers when they start a new account. For example, the bank eliminated questions such as, “How did you hear about USAlliance?” or “What is your color preference for your checks?”

Previously, it could take 30 minutes to open an account, Randall says. The new  mobile feature cuts that down to less than two minutes, he says.

Scanning a driver’s license also adds a layer of security, Randall says. If the consumer is in the app, the bank has access to the smartphone’s GPS location, so the bank can see if the phone’s location and the driver’s license are similar, such as in the same state. If it is not, the bank can red flag the account as possibly fraudulent, Randall says.

The project took four months to complete, Kenworthy says.

Depending on the size of the banks, Gro costs a couple of thousand dollars a year for smaller banks up to as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars for large banks, such as a top-five institution like JPMorgan Chase Bank, for all of the maintenance and testing, Gro’s Mackowick says.

 

Follow mobile business journalist April Dahlquist, associate editor, mobile, at Mobile Strategies 360, @Mobile360April

Sign up for a free subscription to Mobile Strategies 360, a new weekly newsletter reporting on how businesses in all industries use mobile technologies to communicate with and market and sell to their consumers.Mobile Strategies 360 is published by Vertical Web Media LLC, which also publishes Internet Retailer, a business publication on e-retailing.

 

Favorite