In late 2023, the US team was focused on building a bank that works for everyone. But there was one big problem: it was difficult for new customers to start that journey with a Monzo account. In October 2023, only 9% of people who downloaded the Monzo app made it to the end of signup and opened an account.
We knew we could do better, so we sat down to take a closer look at our signup funnel. After poring over the experience, we found some straightforward opportunities for improvement and one larger bet we could take to drastically improve conversion in signup. Building those improvements lifted our conversion rate from 9% to 40% while decreasing time to sign up from 17 minutes to 9 minutes overall, or 4 minutes for our best customers.
To better understand opportunities in signup, our designer went through each individual screen and tap in signup. We counted a whopping 39 unique screens, with an average of 210 taps to complete signup. We also noticed that most of the time spent in signup is wasted typing in basic details that are already stored on your phone - name, address, phone number, etc. Our signup flow didn’t take advantage of any of that, instead requiring you to type all of this information out by hand into our signup screens. This led us to our first improvement: support autofill for basic details, where you could fill in name, address, and phone number from your device with a single tap.
We also noticed that address entry was a crucial stage, as it took the longest for people to enter and was most prone to typos. In the past, we had no address validation, which meant a person could make a simple typo that would slip unnoticed until their address failed to match their credit file further in the process. We wanted to make the signup experience easier even for people who didn’t have their address saved in their contacts, which prompted us to build an integration with Smarty - an API that provides address suggestions as you type.
The last major sore point that stuck out to us was our terms and conditions experience. We require you to agree to four different documents, and we showed each document in-app, making you scroll all the way to the bottom before moving on to the next document - a rather tedious experience.
Instead, we show a clear call-out on the phone number screen linking to the four documents saying that by providing your phone number, you are agreeing to these terms. That small change alone cut a full four screens from our signup funnel while keeping crucial information easy to access for new customers.
After months of testing, we rolled out these changes. We saw a significant improvement straight away - we cut the signup flow from 39 screens and 210 taps to complete down to 17 screens completable in 74 taps, and our signup completion rate jumped from 9% to 19% 🎉
Pushing Further
After our initial round of improvements, we turned our focus to the big bet in signup: our initial research showed that one particular check in our signup flow was responsible for 40% of drop-off in the signup funnel. That check made sense for the UK market, but based on many customer conversations it was turning away good customers in the US. We deliberated with our fincrime and data team and came up with a new strategy that better aligned with the US market and our risk appetite for US customers.
We built out a new integration with Alloy, an identity risk provider that enabled us to check whether your personal or device information was linked to fraud at other banks. Alloy allowed us to configure a set of rules to bucket users into low-risk, medium-risk, and high-risk groups. Rules that were too strict would put too many people in the medium and high-risk buckets, so it took our team a few weeks of fine-tuning to get the ratios right.
Armed with a set of rules to bucket new signups based on risk level, we extended our signup flow to check a new user against Alloy; if they landed in the low-risk bucket, we allowed them to skip the check causing 40% drop-off in our funnel, and everyone else would have to submit that check as before. That way, we could let our best customers get the smoothest experience while keeping risky customers out at the front door.
The idea was simple in theory, but Monzo’s system of over 2000 micro-services assumed that this check was completed for every open account. To make this work, we had to start with thorough design before we could get to actually writing code to support skipping that check in our systems.
The first step was coming up with a system design and drafting a proposal to circulate with several financial crime and security teams in the UK. The changes we were making affected two key security flows in the app (recovering a forgotten PIN and logging in on a new device), so we had to ensure our changes were limited in scope. Through that process, we discovered that one team in the UK had a similar idea that they partially implemented in late 2020 - we were able to dig up their proposal and build on their initial design. After several rounds of suggestions and simplifications to our design, we had approval from the necessary squads in the UK.
After months of refactoring the app and our backend services and careful testing in our staging environment, we were finally ready. We turned on the experiment to 25% of signups; once we gained confidence that the signup flow was working smoothly, we ramped up to all signups.
Conclusion
After removing the additional friction for our lowest-risk customers in signup, we saw some incredible results. Our completion rate surged to an all-time high of 40%, a massive improvement from the 8% completion we saw in October. And not only were more users completing signup, they were able to get through in far less time - the median time to complete signup dropped from 17 minutes to only 7 minutes end to end.
This project is just the beginning of our refocus on the signup experience. We got to see how attention to detail and saving people a few minutes of typing made a massive difference in how many people made it through to experience the magic of Monzo. We’re on a mission to make Monzo the best banking experience in America, and we’ll keep refining our signup flow to get there!
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