U.S. Bank to Expand Mobile Account-Opening Efforts
If you went to a Minnesota Twins game this summer at Target Field, you may have seen a stand from U.S. Bank offering Twins-branded credit cards, and to sign up just took a few clicks on a tablet.
U.S. Bank ran a pilot program for mobile photo account opening, a Mitek Systems technology, with Twins games attendees this summer, and based on the positive results, plans to expand the program to other event spaces in its footprint, according to Chris Peper, VP of mobile channel management for the bank. These events could be other sports games, concerts, or festivals. Expanding the program will be “driven by event partners,” Peper said.
With mobile photo account opening, a user simply provides his driver’s licence, and a tablet device is used to take picture of the back and front, just like a check to be deposited. There is a barcode on the back of most modern licenses that contains all the information on the front, and that is the first place the app look to take the data. If that barcode is not present, said Sarah Clark, VP of product for Mitek, then the info on the front of the license is used. With fake licences, Clark said, the barcode will be a dummy that does not match the data on the front. Mitek’s technology checks to make the front and back match.
“We saw encouraging results,” Peper told Bank innovation. Specifically the bank saw a 50% increase in booked applications over last year’s paper-and-pen process. This may be attributed, Peper said, to a decrease in data entry errors photo account opening brings. Customers still need to enter a few data points and verify that the data that has been ported in via photo is correct. U.S. Bank is continuing to look at the data, Peper said, and will soon have more data from more geographies.
Mitek is also introducing mobile photo functionality into a number of bank mobile websites in December, with a wider rollout in early 2015. The mobile browser is playing a larger role in customers’ overall experiences online, accounting for 55% of all web traffic in 2015, Clark said. The major benefit of this is that new customers can be onboarded without being required to download the bank’s app. “Security is baked into product,” Clark said. “No image is ever stored to the photo roll, and all data is encrypted and securely transmitted.”
Both products certainly reduce friction, and make it faster and easier for customers to open accounts. That is cold comfort to the Twins, though. They finished 2014 in the cellar of the AL Central, though they did get to host the All-Star Game.
