Tidewater Bank

The challenge

Tidewater Bank was losing more than half of the people who started opening an account in its app. The flow asked for nineteen separate pieces of information, sent customers out to their inbox twice and gave no sense of how long the whole thing would take.

The approach

I spent the first two weeks with the support team, listening to recorded calls and mapping every moment where people got stuck. Together with the compliance team we sorted each question into what was legally needed up front and what could wait until after the account was open.

• Cut the flow from nineteen steps to seven, with clear progress from the very first screen
• Replaced manual address entry with postcode lookup and sensible defaults
• Moved identity checks into the app, so nobody has to leave halfway through
• Tested three rounds of prototypes with 24 customers before any code was written

The outcome

The new onboarding launched in spring 2025. Completion rose from 46% to 81%, the average time to open an account dropped to just under four minutes, and onboarding questions to the support team fell by a third.