Digital checking account openings up 200% year-over-year following launch of new application experience.

We’ve never met a customer who likes filling out applications.

What customers do get excited about is their reason for applying for a bank account – achieving their goals and dreams. And they want the first step to be easy and fast. 

That’s why U.S. Bank recently reimagined how customers open digital accounts, overhauling and streamlining each step. As a result, we’ve slashed the time it takes customers to complete an application by more than half.

And customers are flocking to it.

In fact, we saw a nearly 200% increase year-over-year in digital checking account openings within the first few months alone. Digital represented the highest share of total checking accounts opened in December in U.S. Bank history.

What made it so popular?

When customers apply, they experience an easy, intuitive process. The application prepopulates information for existing customers, and also incorporates other best-in-class functions such as address autocomplete – which saves time and minimizes errors. We also made the application significantly shorter, reducing the number of screens by nearly two-thirds, synthesizing common questions together and removing information that’s not needed to open an account.

Now in five minutes or less, opening an account with U.S. Bank unlocks a host of other great experiences: our top-rated mobile app, a branch network that has won numerous recent accolades, our award-winning Smart Assistant and much more.

That’s true whether a customer applies on their own or with the help of a banker, both of which they can do from the comfort of their home, thanks to technologies such as our Cobrowse screensharing feature or our Text-to-Apply capability, which we’ve embedded into this new platform. 

Perhaps the most impressive part of creating this new digital account opening platform was the speed at which it was developed. A small in-house team built and launched the new experience in just six weeks – a timetable that even the most agile startups would find hard to match.

And now the new platform is scaling across the company. From its beginnings in consumer checking, it then expanded to our State Farm alliance, then to Business Checking, then to Personal Line of Credit, and soon to Automated Investor, offered by our affiliate U.S. Bancorp Investments. The scale from deposits to lending to asset management shows the effectiveness of our strategy of Re-use: Build a strong digital product once, and then deploy it in multiple areas easily and quickly – with great cost efficiency and a cohesive user experience.

“Simply put, building common, reusable platforms is the best way to get amazing experiences into the hands of our customers faster and more efficiently,” said Gareth Gaston, executive vice president and chief digital officer for platforms and capabilities at U.S. Bank. “That’s the culture we have at U.S. Bank: focused on our customer, always innovating and delivering a unified One U.S. Bank experience.”