Onboarding - Growth & Risk

Onboarding is the first touch point between the user and the product. It gives the user an impression of the product before they delve deeper. Onboarding stands in this intersection between growth and risk. The goal being to let in as many users we can service while keeping bad actors at bay. On this team, I was responsible for crafting a fun and immersive experience for the user that gives Mercury as an organization the right signals to know whether or not this might be a valid user we can service.

Growth Initiatives

Multi-Org

One of the key initiatives I was a part of at Mercury was working on Multi-Org. Over 50% of business owners own more than one business. One key business opportunity we wanted to explore was speeding up the onboarding application process for existing users that have multiple organizations. Like mentioned previously, a large part of the new application from the existing user was pre-filled with previously provided information, expediting the application process. Internally, these applications were also flagged, giving our internal team the properly signals that this was an existing trusted user.

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Onboarding Landing Page + Pre-filling the Application

A large part of being a part of the growth team is seeing what really pushes the needle when it comes to conversion on the onboarding flow. In this case, conversion is anything that moves metric of the completion of the onboarding flow. One of the tests that I ran on team was to explore different landing pages at the start of the flow to see if there was anything in particular that helped users complete the application. Some of these experiments included marketing the key value propositions to the user at the start of the flow to see that that motivated them to complete the application.

Another initiative that I helped with was prefilled parts of the Mercury application with previously inputted information. For example, if the user already inputted their legal business name, this piece of data would then be cascaded to other parts of the application. Ensuring that the user doesn't need to type out the same information multiple times and can complete the application in a timely manner.

Risk Initiatives

KYC Refresh

A large part of my work on the onboarding team was ensuring we had the most up-to-date KYC information for users. These KYC requirements are required to have the most up-to-date profile and ensuring we have the needed information to provide to our banking partners to meet regulations.

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Account Locking

Account locking and off-boarding is the unglamorous side of onboarding, typically the experience is not great for the end user but our team was tasked with ensuring we are able to give users the opportunity to provide us with the needed information to unlock their account.

As one can imagine, having your business banking account locked gives the user a sense of panic and inhibits them to do their day-to-day business. Our team preformed extensive user reach both externally and internally to understand what were the causes of some of these account locking and what do we communicate to the user.

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We found that we do not disclose the reason of the account to the end user even when the risk of doing so was minor.

Proposed Changes

Final Designs

For the final designs we created an experience that allowed users to understand why they were locked and gave them an opportunity to unlock their account. During this work we addressed different use cases, such as an inactive email address, incomplete or out of date KYC information, business owner disputes and sanctions. In most cases, we have to ask the user to provide their physical address, source of funds, and their operations in the US for them to be able to unlock their account.

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