Open Banking Connection

Context

Coconut enables users to connect their other supported external accounts to the app via Open Banking to take advantage of their tax and accounting features. This negates the need to open a Coconut business current account, opening up Coconut to anyone with a supported account.

The existing connection flow was experiencing a large drop-off in people successfully connecting an account. The UX transferred via third parties (TrueLayer and the bank) as part of the connection process, making tracking harder. The existing flow also allowed people to enter the app without fully setting up their newly connected account, meaning Coconut was yet to start ‘tracking’ it.

Considerations

Coconut had recently been awarded an AISP license, giving the option of greater control over the user journey and not having to rely on the UX of a third party integration when connecting an account. However, certain regulatory requirements remained.
There will always be a handoff to the bank’s own Open Banking connection flow, with variances in how account selection is handled and passed back to Coconut
There is a risk of account connection problems due to issues with the bank feed aggregator (TrueLayer), issues with the bank, issues with Coconut systems, or issues with connectivity

Approach

We would bring the bank selector into the app, rather than relying on the TrueLayer integration. This way we could alert the user if a particular provider was experiencing connection problems before they tried to connect
We would also handle the regulatory requirements, effectively doing away with the need for the TrueLayer screens and handing off directly to the bank
On return to Coconut we will let the user know how many accounts they need to set up and what is going to happen next
On setting up each account we will give inline advice as to what this means for the user

1.1 New goals screen and account connection onboarding flow

1.2 New goals screen and account connection onboarding flow

1.3 New goals screen and account connection onboarding flow

1.4 New goals screen and account connection onboarding flow

1.6b New goals screen and account connection onboarding flow

1.7b New goals screen and account connection onboarding flow

1.11 New goals screen and account connection onboarding flow

Results

The new Open Banking connection flow resulted in a large uptick in users successfully connecting their accounts, going from 47% up to 82%.

As we’d stopped users from entering the app without an account, we also did away with the need for empty states for various areas of the app. This helped speed up the design and development process.