What digital banking can learn from retail checkout design
Digital transformation has swept through banking. But many onboarding experiences still feel stuck in the past. Despite heavy investments in digital apps and upgraded tech stacks, drop-off rates during account opening are still high.
According to The Financial Brand, over 60% of potential customers abandon account openings due to frustrating onboarding experiences.
Elsewhere, retail brands have heeded these lessons and streamlined their checkout experiences: fewer steps, clearer instructions, and interfaces designed to keep the customer journey intuitive, not interruptive.
Here’s the truth: Users don’t mentally separate experiences anymore (banking versus retail). They expect your app to work just as well as the best checkout flows online: fast, intuitive, and human.
To meet those expectations, banks can learn a few lessons from how retail approaches customer experience (CX) design. Let's dive in.
Lesson one: obsess over frictionless experiences
According to Zendesk, over 50% of users will switch to a competitor after just one bad CX touchpoint. Every customer interaction counts — that’s why in retail, the best brands measure micro-interactions. They know exactly where customers hesitate, rage-click, or drop off. And they act on it fast.
But in banking? Friction often hides in plain sight.
Think forms that wipe clean when users hit “Back,” address fields that reject international formats, or mandatory “middle name” inputs with no explanation. Add to that legalese that spikes anxiety and causes stall-outs, and you’ve got a recipe for abandonment. These aren’t just minor UX issues. They’re silent trust-killers.
What to apply from eCommerce
Banks can take a cue from retail and eCommerce businesses by tracking drop-off rates at the micro-level, not just by page but down to individual user interactions. You can also run real user audits and observe how people navigate your flows in practice, not just what analytics tell you.
And finally, fix the things that seem small but bleed trust. These could be minor copy errors, confusing field labels, or inconsistencies in interface behavior that might seem insignificant to internal teams but feel frustrating to users.
Lesson two: understanding progress as visual momentum
Customers who have a clear sense of their progress in their checkout journey are more likely to complete their purchase process. In retail and eCommerce, checkout pages show customers exactly where they are, what’s next, and how long it’ll take.
Simple messaging, like “Step 2 of 4” or “Estimated time: 2 minutes” goes a long way in encouraging checkout completion. That visual clarity is what keeps people going.
Now compare that to a typical banking experience: No progress bar. No heads-up about required documents. No clue if you're halfway done or just getting started.
This lack of guidance stalls users. According to the goal gradient hypothesis, people are more motivated when they see progress. The closer they are to the goal, the harder they try.
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From friction to conversion: optimizing digital bank account opening with customer insights
What to apply from eCommerce
Banks need to show progress bars that actually mean something. By providing a clear indication of the customer's progress in the onboarding process, customers will be more emotionally motivated to complete it.
Set clear expectations early by telling users what they’ll need in order to progress and how long it’ll take. You can also make the onboarding process more manageable by breaking sign-up forms into small, digestible steps.
Lesson three: win by watching your users
Retail and eCommerce teams live and breathe user observation. They go beyond just A/B testing—they watch how real people interact, where they scroll, where they hesitate, and where they give up.
For digital banks, this level of visibility is crucial.
You can’t rely on analytics alone to understand when a customer gets confused between “Open Account” and “Enroll in Online Banking.” Or when a user uploads the wrong ID because instructions weren’t clear. Watch the video below to learn how T. Rowe Price leveraged quick insights from customers to identify and fix a friction point in its new account opening process.
Real insight comes from watching real interactions. Customer feedback from these observations will allow banks to identify moments of friction before they impact trust. Whether it's confusion around unclear terminology, hesitation at unexpected steps, or frustration caused by buggy interfaces, these moments provide direct human feedback.
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Watching customer interactions in real-time will allow for a more customer-centric CX design to be built before they scale, one that solves customer issues proactively. This approach doesn’t just fix broken flows—it builds trust and long-term loyalty.
What to apply from eCommerce
Banks should run usability tests before launching new flows to catch usability issues early. Incorporating video-based feedback tools lets you see where users pause, express frustration, or get lost—emotions that standard analytics can't pick up. All these findings should then be centralized for easy access across leadership teams.
Lesson four: trust is built in seconds
It’s wild when you think about it: users are more comfortable entering their credit card on an online store than uploading their ID to a bank.
Why? Because retail and eCommerce stores have mastered the art of trust cues.
Trust cues, in the CX perspective, are signals — visual or verbal — that subconsciously reassure customers that a product or process is safe and credible. These cues can range from well-placed security badges that convey data protection to friendly micro-copy that reassures users that they’re in control.
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Increase digital bank account opening
Simple phrases like “You can review before purchase” or human-like error messages like “Oops! That didn’t work. Try again” can help reduce anxiety and encourage users to continue to checkout. In eCommerce, these cues are often intentionally placed during moments of hesitation, building confidence when it’s most needed.
While many online retail stores have adopted this, banks are falling behind. They're still riddled with cold, robotic language, jargon terms, and confusing flows.
What to apply from eCommerce
To close this gap, banks need to focus on providing micro-copy that reassures instead of alarms. Humanize your error messages and help texts, strip away the jargon, and replace it with simple words customers can understand easily.
It's also important to frame sensitive steps during the account opening process, such as document uploads, with empathy. Acknowledge the user’s effort and reassure them that their data is safe.
Humanize digital banking
Banking onboarding isn’t just a legal process—it’s a human one.
And, like in retail, customers want their banking onboarding process to be as easy as purchasing a T-shirt from their favorite online store.
Banks need to earn back the trust of customers. And it starts by being human. Instead of relying on traditional analytics, banks must understand how their customers interact with their products in real-time. With a human-centric CX design, the customer onboarding process can be smooth and frictionless, delighting customers at every touchpoint.
