Incremental supports Virgin Money in increasing its customer acquisition rate from 5% to 34% with new client onboarding solution.
“The Microsoft Power Platform offering, implemented by Incremental, has been game–changing for Virgin Money’s position as a leader for small and medium-sized businesses within the finance industry.”
Wilson Ferguson – Senior Digital Development Manager, Virgin Money
Virgin Money is a leading banking and financial services organisation, operating in the UK.
With over 6.4 million customers and structured around three divisions – personal, mortgages and business – Virgin Money offers a full range of products and services for consumers and small and medium-sized businesses.
Disrupting the market by digitising the client onboarding process
Virgin Money is on a journey to disrupt the business banking market with a digital-first approach. That being said, Virgin Money’s client onboarding process forced its customers to go through a time-consuming and very manual process to apply for business banking current accounts. The process resulted in a lengthy waiting period for a decision to be made (due to time consuming manual backend processes) which was causing high customer drop-out rates throughout the process.
With new challenger banks providing fully digital onboarding processes as standard, by not updating its onboarding system, Virgin Money risked losing potential customers, making it difficult for it to hit its ambitious growth targets.
Further drivers for change included the need for:
- A scalable platform that can, in time, be deployed to other areas of the business
- Enhanced customer experience and satisfaction reporting
- Reduced turnaround times and reduced effort for agents
- Straight-through decisioning for customers (no colleague involvement)
- Increases in customer conversion, market share and cross-sell.
Virgin Money took a proactive approach – to not only compete, but lead the market with a fully digital client onboarding process in order to increase its overall market share. It put together a taskforce for change, its objectives being:
- To disrupt the market with an intuitive, flexible and automation-led digital client onboarding platform for business current account applicants
- To create a digital marketplace for existing customers
- To transform the current onboarding process.
Customer pain points:
- Time consuming for agents to manually process applications
- Customers who were applying were required to complete a large number of questions manually for the application submission
- Long customer wait times as further information was requested post application
- Little data on when and why customers were dropping out of the process.
An innovative solution not offered by any traditional banks or financial institutions in the business banking space
Incremental has been working with Virgin Money since 2017 on numerous digital transformation projects to revolutionise its business banking operations and offerings. The relationship spanned the Covid-19 pandemic when Incremental provided Virgin Money with critical process automation support for high-priority Covid response projects, following the introduction of government-backed loan schemes. As a result of previous project successes, Incremental were Virgin Money’s partner of choice to support the implementation of its new client onboarding solution.
Incremental worked with Virgin Money in the discovery phase to imagine what a redesign of its current process would look like with Microsoft technology. Building on their existing usage for Dynamics 365 for Sales within Business Banking, Virgin Money liked Microsoft Power Platform because of its ability to be quickly changed and updated – making it easily adaptable to accommodate any changing requirements.
Benefits of Power Platform:
- Out-of-the-box functionality allowing for the integration of different systems
- Low/no code nature allowing for quick delivery times
- Good configurability providing the ability to react quickly and seamlessly to change
- Enterprise-grade technology which provides security, accessibility and resilience
- Configurable extensions such as digital signature, Power Automate and Power BI.
Following discovery, Incremental’s team of financial services technology experts built, implemented and launched a best-in-class client onboarding platform for Virgin Money, providing maximum automation, minimum customer input and an enterprise-level automated decisioning process for new-to-bank clients.
The Virgin Money branded online portal built with Power Platform (Power Pages, Power Automate, Model-driven apps and Power BI) and integrations to Virgin Money’s banking systems and third-party credit decisioning platforms allows prospective customers to:
- Search and find their company information via Companies House
- Add additional information (reducing the need for post-application information requests)
- Apply with an instant approval or rejection response
- Receive and access their real-time automatic bank account details and online banking profile.
Jamie Logue, Head of Banking, Incremental Group said, “The innovative solution created by Incremental and Virgin Money is unprecedented and not offered by any traditional banks or financial institutions in the business banking space. Using Microsoft’s Power Platform Portal with integrations to Virgin Money’s banking systems and third-party credit decisioning platforms, the fully branded online portal allows prospective customers to find their company information, add additional information and submit an application with instant approval or rejection and real-time automatic bank account and online banking profile creation. This was (and is for the wider market) normally a 2+ week process, however now a Virgin Money customer can now complete an online application and receive a business banking sort code, account number and online banking profile, on average, within minutes.”
“Incremental’s agile approach to project delivery worked really well, as we could make changes iteratively. The whole process was really collaborative, meaning we could build strong teams to deliver high quality outputs quickly.”
A leader in small and medium sized businesses within the finance industry
Key results:
- Customer acquisition has grown 580%* since implementation and continues to grow, due to a faster and more user friendly application process. *(Acquisition increased from 5% to 34%)
- Digital approach has internally saved time and money due to less back-office employee involvement.
- Huge increases in straight-through application (no colleague involvement), with an average journey time being completed in 10-25 minutes instead of days/weeks.
- 50% of customer accounts are now opened within 5 days of applying.
- 20% of customers are being onboarded and underwritten with a wholly digital experience.
- With better reporting, Virgin Money can continue to identify bottlenecks and dropout rates, incrementally improving the client onboarding journey.
Due to the success of Virgin Money’s client onboarding project, Incremental was awarded Financial Technology Partner of the Year at the Scottish Financial Technology Awards 2022.
In addition to the unique offering for the market, the onboarding project allowed Incremental and Virgin Money to accelerate agile adoption. This has resulted in a system that enriches over time through continuous improvement, learning and adaptations. The size and scale of this project allowed both organisations to recruit, adopt and implement agile practices in what was, historically a waterfall environment. Working together to develop an agile ways-of-working that succeeds across a wide range of departments, stakeholders and settings, the agile adoption for both Virgin Money and Incremental has become the gold standard for running projects across both organisations.
Constantly evolving
Incremental and Virgin Money’s partnership has proven to be long-lasting and truly agile, particularly with the client onboarding project. Since the original solution was implemented, multiple enhancements and extensions have been, and continue to be, implemented to further increase the ROI of the solution and expand the customer benefits across a wider base.
Scheduled for mid-2023, Incremental and Virgin Money have plans to expand the client onboarding solution to accommodate more complex business structures and to bring consistency among different business areas.