How to acquire customers fast and at scale for your bank

In the digital engagement banking era, customers have higher expectations of their financial institution. Consumers are no longer content with traditional banking products and simple transactional services – and if it’s not up to their standards they tend to look elsewhere.

According to the Backbase Fintech and Banking 2025 IDC report, the top three factors that drive customer loyalty include access to a wide range of financial services, fast turnaround time, and empathy.

We will take a deeper look into how to best optimize the customer journey, better the digital sales experience, and the key to creating seamless onboarding processes. All of these steps aim to assist banks in quickly expanding their customer base.

Did you know that most banks fail to convert 85% of customers on digital channels? Well, it’s no surprise considering customers are often faced with time-consuming application processes, have limited support touchpoints, and have to cough up a huge amount of information to even apply for a financial product or service.

Something has to change if financial institutions want to compete with big techs and challenger banks. These competitors are already offering bespoke digital onboarding experiences that are frictionless, engaging, and have near-instant support services.

It’s clear that banks need to re-architect their thinking when it comes to providing engaging solutions to their customers. Banks should also shift away from high-friction processes and adopt solutions that streamline end-to-end digital processes for faster customer acquisitions.

For example, Austria-based BKS Bank saw a 90% reduction in processing time for lease applications – with an average of five minutes to complete applications. Powered by Backbase Digital Sales, using an end-to-end digital process, improved the bank’s cost-income ratio by increasing sales while reducing operational costs.

The banking industry has a long way to go when it comes to optimizing its digital engagement and sales models. Many banks are operating with antiquated technologies and in silos – which can make it different down the line when the bank wants to improve ways of working and keep up with the latest technology.

Also, legacy systems often impede digital cross-selling processes. Without a comprehensive overview of the customer, employees rely on a variety of programs for information to handle onboarding and origination processes for new products and services. This can not only be time-consuming for the employee but is usually inconvenient and frustrating for customers.

One example of a bank that was able to improve its digital sales process is Bahrain’s leading local bank, the National Bank of Bahrain (NBB). NBB leveraged Backbase’s Engagement Banking Platform to provide a better experience for its customers. This allowed the customers to access a comprehensive suite of banking services all in one place. This gave customers the flexibility and accessibility of having the right financial solutions at the right time.

Understanding how mature you are in the engagement banking journey is a good place to start and understand what areas need to be addressed.

Seamless onboarding and origination processes are pivotal in accelerating digital-first experiences and paving the way for cross-selling opportunities.

Looking at the digital-first players like Revolut or Grab, most have fine-tuned their onboarding processes to allow customers to open accounts and apply for different products without going through cumbersome and tedious processes.

The leading Georgian bank, Basisbank, partnered with Backbase to expand its retail banking offering while providing customers access to all their banking needs on one platform. Once again, using our Engagement Banking Platform, Basisbank was able to build turnkey customer experiences that narrowed the onboarding process down to a few clicks – optimizing its customer conversation rates.

As banks and financial institutions look to speed up customer acquisition and retention and increase their share of wallet, they must start building a seamless digital sales journey that addresses their customer pain points for increased opportunities.