File No. NBM-0714 · Retail banking · Internal: prepared for review
Case open
The Abandoned Application
Northbank Mutual was losing three of every four digital account openings before the applicant reached submit. This file records what was found on the branch floor, what went wrong in the middle of the project, and what actually changed by November.
Client
Northbank Mutual
Scope
Digital account opening, end to end
Engagement
04 Feb to 12 Nov 2024
Filed
14 November 2024
Exhibit A
The scene. Select a marker
Finding 01
The identity check arrives before any reason to trust it
Applicants were asked to photograph an ID document on the second screen, before a product had been chosen or a rate shown. Two in five abandonments happened here.
Evidence: 2,140 session recordings, Feb to Mar
1
2
3
4
5
Exhibit B
Chronology: February to November
04 Feb
The brief, as written
Reduce abandonment in digital account opening. Baseline agreed at 76% of starts ending before submission, measured across the previous quarter.
19 Feb
Two weeks on the branch floor
Four sites, eleven days, no interviews. Just watching. This is where the printed form turned up, and where the account-opening desk turned out to be a photocopier.
08 Mar
The field audit lands
Twenty-four fields compared line by line against the core banking record. Nine were already known. The team stopped calling it a form problem and started calling it a data problem.
02 Apr
First prototype tests well
Eight participants. Identity moved to the end, three fields pre-filled. Completion in test more than doubled, and everyone took it as evidence that the difficult part was behind them.
Margin note: assumption logged, never examined
21 May
The core integration fails
The real-time read the prototype depended on did not exist. Customer records were reachable only through an overnight batch, and no team owned the work needed to expose them live. Pre-fill, the whole basis of the redesign, was suddenly hypothetical.
Margin note: project at risk
17 Jun
Compliance pauses the pilot
Moving identity verification later in the sequence conflicted with Northbank’s own KYC standard. The pilot stopped for nine weeks. Two of the four workstreams stood down, and there was nothing to show anyone.
Margin note: nine weeks, nothing shipped
05 Aug
Rescope, rather than push
Scope was cut instead of the date being defended. Pre-fill was limited to the three fields available in real time, and identity was re-sequenced inside the compliance standard rather than around it. The release moved six weeks.
30 Sep
Pilot resumes, two branches
A reduced version went live to two sites and their online catchment. Abandonment fell inside the first fortnight, though the funnel was re-instrumented in the same window, which complicates the reading.
12 Nov
Full release
The flow shipped to every channel. The nine-field ambition finished six fields short; that gap now sits on the platform roadmap rather than in this file.
Exhibit C
The verdict: entered as evidence
Figure
What it measures
Window
Source
31%
Applications abandoned before submission, against a 76% baseline
30 days after release
Funnel analytics, Northbank Mutual
9.4 min
Median time to open a new personal current account, start to submit
November 2024
Session timing, 1,880 sampled sessions
3 of 9
Identified fields actually pre-filled in real time from the core record
At release
Integration scope document, v4
None
Exceptions granted to the bank’s KYC sequencing standard. The work moved around it, not through it
Full engagement
Compliance review record
Two of these numbers came from design work. The other two came from constraints this project did not win against, and they are in the file for the same reason everything else is. The abandonment figure is also measured against a funnel that was re-instrumented in October, so a share of the improvement is better measurement rather than changed behaviour.