From Friction to Fruition: How U.S. Bank and Atomic Turned a Pain Point into a Deposit Driver

As customer expectations continue to advance, customer experience has become more crucial than ever. It's never been more essential for financial institutions to prioritize meeting customer needs with amazing experiences that are differentiators. Learn how U.S. Bank and Atomic used customer insights and research to identify one of the largest sources of friction in customer acquisition – and flip it on its head to become a key driver of business results. Leaders from both companies will take the stage to offer insights and perspectives on how they're collaborating to bring first-in-the-market value to customers and deposit growth for the bank.

Transcription:

Jordan Wright (00:10):
Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you for coming. Even if you didn't know who the speakers are, we're grateful to have you here. So my name is Jordan Wright. I'm the Co-Founder and CEO of Atomic Financial . And I'm joined by Chancze Lepore, who I'll have introduced himself.

Chancze Lepore (00:26):
Hey, thanks. I'm Chancze Lepore with US Bank. So I lead our digital account opening and onboarding as well as our shop experiences for all of our deposit products. So think.com, the marketplace, all the way through the application, opening the account all the way through the first 90 days and setting up your new account and getting the customer on their way.

Jordan Wright (00:44):
So if you saw it today, it was announced that according to Javelin, US Bank has the number one mobile experience in banking right now. And so excited to be able to hear from Chance it's all his responsibility, all mobile banking, beauty and prowess. No, he was the first one to say it is not just me, but seriously, this has been a great relationship between us. So we started working together, atomic and US Bank in, we launched a product together in December of 2022. And so today we're going to talk through some of what US Bank did much before that to be able to set them up for success, Atomics product that they use as a direct deposit switching solution so that when consumer signs up for a new checking account, they can move their paycheck over to the new account. So that's kind of where we'll get started today. And so I'll start with asking Chance to go back because really what they did three or four years ago set them up for success at the end of 2023. But Chance, do you mind providing a little bit more of that background?

Chancze Lepore (01:47):
Yeah, absolutely. So it sounds cliche, but it really did all start with the customer. We had obviously business goals around driving, deposits, account opening, and then obviously retaining those customers and deposits. So what we did was back three, four years ago, we actually brought customers in and started to co-create with them and asked them, what's not working? Are you having trouble either deciding to apply with us? Our start rates were lower, our submit rates through the application were lower, and then ultimately retention and getting customers to fund that account. We thought we had a lot of room to improve. So what we found out was there was really three main points we uncovered from our clients that they were struggling with. Number one was they were confused with all of our different checking accounts. So we had five different checking accounts at the time, and in the shopping experience was hard for 'em to decipher what the difference was to actually choose their account.

(02:35):
They also called out that our application process was way too long, way too confusing, and they got stuck and it wasn't mobilely optimized at the time. And then lastly, it was really around the onboarding experience. So once they actually got that account set up, we made it too hard to fund the account to actually put money into the account. We also made it really hard to get set up with the account. And then lastly, we heard very loud and clear customer's biggest pain point from actually moving a relationship over from one bank to us was switching their direct deposit as well as all their payments. So bill pay switching subscriptions, as well as again moving that main paycheck over to US Bank. So we took a pretty, what's the right word here? We took approach, look at all three of those major pain points and we started with the shop experience. So we're partnering with our product partners, we simplified our checking suite down to two checking products, completely redesigned our shopping experience. From there, we moved into the application experience slash the application by more than 50%, increased our submit rates by more than 25%. And then lastly, we started to look at our onboarding experience. So

Jordan Wright (03:43):
Just really quickly before you go there, chance, what's Jonathan, your boss's title, what's his title?

Chancze Lepore (03:48):
Head of digital Sales.

Jordan Wright (03:50):
Yeah, I love that, that you have a person in product organization that's responsible for sales at US Bank, and I think that you just alluded to this in the fact that your checkout experience, your sales experience, what it looks like, but I actually love that that's Jonathan's title and the way that you think about this as a sales experience the whole time as opposed to just product or anything like that. Anyway, sorry.

Chancze Lepore (04:09):
Yeah, no, absolutely. So again, moving into onboarding experience, what we noticed was we really didn't have a way one to welcome our clients into our authenticated space. Well, and we didn't proactively help them set up their new account. And so we built out, we started with our checking product, but we knew forward looking, we wanted to support all of our consumer products. And so we build out an enterprise micro app within our authenticated space, both mobile and online banking, which now supports all of our consumer products. It helps clients set up things like paperless alerts, but then more importantly, it also starts to deepen the relationship. And so we can personally target clients whether for additional deposit product, a lending product, and then also looking at moving over their direct deposit.

Jordan Wright (04:59):
Awesome. And by the way, I wouldn't have around and met most of you before we started here. I hope you're taking notes of questions, have 10 minutes or so at the end of this for questions. And so please feel free to ask Chance or myself probably just chance questions on this. So if I kind of pair that back five years ago, US Bank identified, or four years ago, US Bank identified three key pain points that we're limiting initial consumer adoption at the bank said we're going to simplify here, we're going to set up our technology structure so that we can implement new things to be able to help them. And then jumping forward to then in December of 2023, we launched our integration together. And then contextually for all of you, it's fascinating because US Bank is the first of the top 10 banks to go live with a product like this.

(05:47):
I think they were actually probably the first of the top 25 banks to go live with a product like this, which is an interesting situation for the number five bank in the United States in terms of size to go do. But also if you think back December of 2023, fast forward four months and we have SP Bs collapse coming out of SBS collapse. We have six RFPs from top 25 banks in a space where there was only one the year prior. And so that's I think interesting context for this. So US Bank was positioned very well in terms of the deposit crisis of sorts because of some decisions they made early on. But why don't you tell us about maybe what led up to December launch and then please feel free to share the good, bad and the ugly of how it went.

Chancze Lepore (06:32):
Yeah, absolutely. Like Jordan mentioned, prior to that, we launched our onboarding experience about six to eight months prior. And so we had been testing into that for quite a bit. At the same time we've been looking internally and saying, how are we going to tackle direct deposit switching? And so we thought we looked something we could solve. Do we want to build this in-house? Ultimately, obviously we chose to partner on this. It wasn't where we wanted to spend our manpower muscle. That's not a place where we're an expert to build all those integrations with all the employers and payroll providers. But what we also did was to Jordan's point was since we were the first large bank to launch this also, it wasn't a proven technology at that point. And so we were very cautious around where and how we would implement the solution. So we had a very targeted use case that we started with for one checking product within onboarding, and we deliver that I think honestly in about a quarter or less. And so I think by doing that, we were able to one, prove out, yes, customers do want to use this product, but we also throughout that process found out there's a lot of ways to actually improve the process. And so I think we can get into those here in a second as well.

Jordan Wright (07:42):
Yeah, I would say that was definitely a key item. So if you look at conversion rate in December of 2023 in conversion rate, now conversion rate has essentially doubled at US Bank since then. It had doubled Q1 of 2023 to Q1 of 2024. And you had also mentioned chance that volume through on coming out of the other side of it

Chancze Lepore (08:05):
Has doubled in that same time period.

Jordan Wright (08:07):
And so when you look at that sort of success, obviously well timed with what happened with SVB, and just again by way of context, atomic is very fortunate and this is where half more than half of entrepreneurship is luck. And so we're very fortunate that the US bank had gone live because those six RFPs that happened in 2023, we won every single RFP that happened from a top 25 bank in 2023. And so we work with five of the top 10 banks in the United States. We also work with Chime, Robinhood, Coinbase, SoFi, PayPal, a lot of those large fintechs. And so as we looked at this problem, we were extremely grateful. I'm just saying this publicly on a stage that US Bank chose to go with us because when the market then said, okay, who do we use? We were already live at the top five bank, which was extremely beneficial to us. So then if you look at the next stage, how did we double conversion rate and how do we double the amount of traffic coming out the other side?

Chancze Lepore (09:09):
And I think there was really two pronged at this point. So again, we start with that one very targeted use case. But from there we started looking at how do we increase the awareness? So we started expanding within our onboarding platform to all of our deposit products, so all the checking products, all of our saving products. We also then started integrating into a lot of our other tools. So it's integrated into our smart assistant, so clients who are chatting or talking to our smart assistant, it integrates right into the atomic solution for direct deposit switching. The other one that's really key is we are all about our digital plus human approach. So while we want to build our experiences to be as seamless as possible for clients to not need a banker, we really see that as a differentiator because we can offer great human experiences to our customers as well.

(09:54):
And so with our co-browse tool, which we also enabled with Atomic, customers can walk through and the bankers can actually walk them through the setup through direct deposit switching as well. And so that's been a key differentiator for our customers who just need a little bit of handholding as this may be a new technology for them. So we attacked it top of funnel. So we have a lot more awareness in terms of the entry points in digital. Our bankers are talking about it. We also tied it to our marketing campaigns as it usually is a qualifying activity for marketing. And at the same time we partnered with Jordan and the Atomic team around authentications. So we also got more clients in the funnel and then more clients that were able to authenticate through the funnel as well.

Jordan Wright (10:34):
And the Cobrowse solution, the US bank is amazing to me. I love the idea of leveraging the technology plus human interaction. So in this experience, if I call into an agent, they can see what I'm seeing inside of my app. And that experience allows that person to not say, you see those three bars, that hamburger in the top right corner, they can actually see it together at the same time. And I think that's been an excellent use case here for the technology. So anyway, I love what you guys built there. So you touched on some of the ways you brought more traffic in One of the technologies that we created at the time, because Atomic has, we're in an interesting situation when we launch with a customer and they say, gosh, conversion rate isn't where we want it. Sometimes we have to be like, well, our product's the same, whether it's you using it or Chime using it or PayPal using it.

(11:24):
And that's kind of a tough conversation sometimes for us because the same product for everybody. But at the same time, it also gives us an opportunity to be able to come into them and say, but here are some of the in an anonymized way, why don't you go download this app? Why don't you go try this and see how people are introducing the product and getting the product in. But we also, when we create gains for one client, we create gains for everyone. So we launched a solution called Auth that is an experience where we don't have to get credentials from a consumer in order to log into a payroll system and change direct deposit. That led to a doubling effect across many of our payroll systems we were working on and a tripling effect across a couple of them in terms of conversion rate.

(12:03):
And so that also was a key beneficiary in US banks doubling of conversion rate while they also doubled the volume coming out the other side. A couple of things that I think are also important to go into here. When US Bank has had launched the solution, there was a great focus on let's launch in the smallest way possible first, and I want to go back to that because Chance mentioned that, but we see a lot of customers try to eat the elephant whole. They're trying to launch the entire experience of everything they want on day one. And I think there was a lot of wisdom to your approach there. And I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about maybe some of the key lessons you've worked at other banks. You've seen how other people have done it. Even within US Bank, I'm sure you don't do it perfectly all the time. I don't think I kid is in the room, hopefully he's not. But even within US Bank, you don't do it all the time. So wouldn't you mind sharing some of your takeaways there?

Chancze Lepore (12:53):
Yeah, I think fortunately or unfortunately, we probably all in this room have been a part of an implementation where your eyes get a little bigger than what you should bite, chew, bite off more than you could chew. And so with this particular implementation, we really wanted to start with that one main use case because again, it wasn't a proven technology. We didn't want to make a large investment into the solution until we could prove it out that it actually was helping us grow our deposit base and retaining clients. That's really, we are moving from counting widgets and units to really looking at how do we truly drive that customer relationship and become prime and central within our customers' lives. And so again, this was just a really classic opportunity that we were able to take within US Bank to say, here's one key use case.

(13:39):
Did this actually pay for itself? And then how do we continue to grow? And throughout this, I think the other piece that we're really proud of is we've been AB testing all along the way. So with the initial launch, we had two different designs that were out in market, and then we've been AB testing probably three or four different experiments. We've also partnered with Atomic on at least three or four different experience within their solution. And through that, we're always pushing a champion and challenger out to our clients. And so by doing that, I know again, it sounds a little cliche, but it truly does add to the overall value.

Jordan Wright (14:15):
So you and team at US Bank looked into your crystal ball, you saw SVB coming, just kidding. You didn't actually see it, but you were lucky enough to be well positioned, right? And so if you look into your crystal ball again and you're saying, what is next for US Bank? What are you saying? Okay, we've cut our onboarding experience time from 10 minutes to five minutes, I think, right? You have a doubling effect on conversion rate. You've doubled the amount of people coming through the flow. So what is the next move for US Bank in terms of continuing to, because we're certainly not all the way there yet.

Chancze Lepore (14:46):
Yeah, I think we heard this last couple of days at the conference. I think we have a lot of opportunity to use the data that we have at the bank. And so while we do do personalization, I think there's still opportunities to personalize our overarching experience for our clients. And so one of the big ones is our onboarding experience today. While it is dynamic and personalized to the product level, how do we take that down to the next level and actually get to a one-to-one experience with our customers? And so what truly are they looking to do with that new account? And then secondly, I think the next opportunity we have is how do we use the data we have either through our own data or with our partners to proactively prompt these customers to set up their direct deposit and uncover who they actually work for. We have all the data at hand today. We're forcing and asking the client to choose who do you work for? Who's your payroll provider? How do we proactively present that to the customer and make this a moment of delight? And so that's where I see things going next is we really need be more proactive, more personalized as opposed to reacting to the customer coming to us and saying, I want to do X, Y, Z.

Jordan Wright (15:52):
And without revealing too much of US bank strategy on this, I would maybe comment more broadly on some things that we see. And so if you look at open banking as when people refer to open banking today, most of it's talking about connecting to a banking aggregating data and pull that data out for open banking. When we think about open banking in the future of it, what's exciting to us is now that I see all this information about how they get paid from this other bank or what payments they're making, how do I make it so that they then can switch that information over to the new bank account? And so right now there's a 30 to 40% drop in our funnel in Atomic. When somebody drops on our search page to find their employer or their payroll system, what if you could pass them through and we already knew their payroll system and their employer, then you would be able to skip that 30, 40% drop mainly, and you'd be able to deliver that person to, it looks like you get paid by a DP, or it looks like your employer is Kroger, and we can deliver them directly into that experience.

(16:49):
I think that's the exciting part of personalization that comes into play. And then the other piece is, so Atomic specifically, we have the ability to direct deposit switching. We also have a payment switching product. And so the payment switching product makes it so that if you come in, we could see, oh, you're getting charges from Amazon on a regular basis. Let's change the top of wallet card on file at Amazon. You're changing out payment methods for, you're paying at and t, you're paying T-Mobile. Those are exciting things for us to be able to say, okay, let's go change those payments out to the new one. But even more exciting for us, we refer, so that's our first pillar for Atomic as lead on primacy, even more exciting for us is being able to lean into things like let's make it easier for somebody to let's power and channel that consumer's initiative.

(17:32):
So all of us have a desire to be better at our finances generally. I would say. In fact, I sat with one of our employees recently. I was doing research on a product we're working on, and she said, I have a $1,200 a year savings sitting in my switching my cell phone provider. I'm like, well, why don't you do it? That's a big savings. I was aware of how much this person made. She's like, I'm just lazy. And the tendency is to look down my nose a little bit at her and be like, gosh, why are you so lazy? And then I look at my own accounts, I'm like, gosh, I got $3,000 a year in savings, make a few switches happen. And so when we look at the connectivity for payment switching, that's really opening the door for us so that US Bank could provide an experience in the future where they could say, Hey, peacock bought the rights to this game for Spring for the NFL.

(18:21):
What if we were to offer on Monday to that consumer, if we were to say, Hey, looks like you watched the game this weekend. We saw a transaction come through again to the personalization piece. We saw a transaction come through for Peacock over the weekend. We're going to assume it was for the NFL game because most people that were signing up this weekend were NFL related. What if we were to tell 'em on Monday, would you like us to pause that subscription for you until the next major peacock sporting event? That is, to me, that's a bank helping me be better with my money. And those are the sorts of experiences we are looking to enable. Obviously Peacock is not in the room, nor would they love that, that we are offering that experience. I see some people chuckling, maybe that's what we're talking about, but that is the best thing for the consumer.

(18:59):
And so the other opportunities that come along those lines, gosh, we just canceled the subscription for you. Would you like us to move that money that you were paying into an emergency savings account? But that's some of the things I think we can see coming in the future, so we can help that person prepare for the future for their finances, but also again, help them be better with their money. We have about 10 minutes remaining here, so if there are questions from the audience, please feel free to raise your hand while we're walking through a couple more pieces and we'd be happy to take questions directly from you. But we also have a couple of other pieces we can cover that work. Okay, great. I'm going to keep an eye out from the right side of my eye. Okay, good. In terms of what's next, do you also see, you talked about using data to personalize. Are there any other things that you feel like we might've missed so far on what's next?

Chancze Lepore (19:48):
Yeah, you started to hit on, I think what's big for us as well is how do we have our customers back? And so we are proactively looking at how do we help our clients manage their money, manage their spending? And so you hit on call pieces of it without getting too much details, but that's I think a big one in the current economic environment is how do we continue to help our clients save money, manage money, save for the big things as opposed to some of the more mundane pieces of banking? How do we let them banking, they're not excited to bank. How do we get them back to what they actually want to do and get on with their day?

Jordan Wright (20:22):
And it took maybe 15 years for OAuth to become a thing in banking, and we actually see that that sort of relationships with payroll systems on our side where we're switching direct deposit, the open banking relationships are obviously with banks. We see those sorts of relationships changing over the next five to seven years. But the fact of the matter is there's only a few payroll systems that are rolling out relationships like this, and their integrations are worse than our integrations with those payroll systems without an actual integration. And so I'm also, as we look forward to the future, I'm excited about a future where an A DP and a Paychex and a pay loss, a workday, all these sorts of things work seamlessly as opposed to people having to log in. But the fact of the matter is today it's just not there because the integrations just aren't working yet.

Chancze Lepore (21:09):
Yeah, I think that's a good point. So I think we see still today, unfortunately, there's still a lot of clients who are still using the prefilled PDF form. So I think you're all familiar with most banks offer a prefilled PDF. I think until we get to that point where clients don't have to have the username password, we're still going to offer our customers the option. So we have options for you. If you feel comfortable and you know your credentials to log into the payroll provider or employer, you can do so if you want to use the prefab PDF, we're still going to give you that option. And we're also going to just give you instructions on how you can go through your employer site to switch your direct deposit. And so I think having that choice in the short term, making sure we have a fully digital solution, but also giving the clients that choice is super also important.

Jordan Wright (21:48):
Awesome. Thank you. Questions from the group, and if you want to stand up and state your question, I can restate it for the audience in case we need to. But thoughts or questions so far for chance or myself, I've been told you have to wait six seconds of silence, so don't make me do it. Yeah,

Audience Member 1 (22:14):
So I think with payment switching, with direct deposit switching, there's some credentialing involved, right? So if you switch, say I have authentic to this place direct deposit switch to have my credentials. So I asked this in a session yesterday, I'll ask it in this session today, is client consent or customer consent and for a big part of getting that engagement. So what do you guys see as the future of that connection so that I don't have to ask the customer for credentials here, for credentials here, because I think that they get a little fatigued having to figure out all those credentialing mechanisms to get the data connection. It's like how can we use the connection app to enable as much as we,

Jordan Wright (23:00):
It's a great question. I'll just repeat it in case anybody in the back didn't hear the question is there's a lot of credentialing being used today, and if you have to use credentials every time, that could be a fatiguing experience for a consumer. Am I restating your question sufficiently Well, so the question is what does that future look like? Are we credentialing forever? Are we endless fatigue or is there some bright future where we don't have to do that chance You want to take it? Or do you want me to take it?

Chancze Lepore (23:23):
Do you want me to do first, second, add on my color?

Jordan Wright (23:25):
Okay, great. So one of the things I'll say here is that with one of the key technologies that we developed called Tru Auth, it allows you to actually integrate into the native password manager. And so this is still credentialing, but it's a lot better than I have to remember my password right now because there could just be a face ID and it automatically populates credentials for me as opposed to having to type them out at all fat fingering 'em, getting 'em wrong. So that's what the near term looks like. I think the longer term looks like we have relationship with a DP, we have a relationship with Workday or with one of the backend payroll systems, Workday. We have several other relationships in the works. The problem is data has to be, some kind of data needs to be passed to authenticate this person.

(24:07):
I mean, you don't want to allow somebody to switch a direct deposit without a two-factor authentication of some kind to make sure it's them. And so is a two-factor to their phone better than credentialing? Yeah, I think it is, but I don't think there are some times when we need friction and direct deposit switching is a time that we need friction. Now, if somebody wants to go pay my Netflix bill for me, they're welcome to. So in that case, maybe we can do something a little bit different. Hopefully it's my mortgage to send my Netflix bill. But I think those are the sorts of things that longer term, it took us four years for a DP to have the first conversation with us on the payment switching side. I think it'll take us a few years before we're doing enough volume that we can go to the likes of a Netflix and be able to have a direct relationship there.

Chancze Lepore (24:47):
Yeah, the only thing I'd add is we do have a couple use cases today where I think it's also just allowing the customer know what they're consenting to and someone else, I think the same time you asked the same thing. And so not to repeat it, but it actually is true, and we do do this today for a couple of use cases where we found really good engagement where we can actually use different information to market to clients as long as they consent and they're very active and do so. The other thing to where you were saying is I think if we get to a place where we actually could match that data behind the scenes very well, and it could just be as simple as a normal step up like we do internally today for any high risk transaction, that to me seems like gold as well. But yeah, there's some of that friction that needs to be in there. So tough question. Don't have a easy answer on that one.

Jordan Wright (25:33):
Thank you for the question. Anybody else have a question? Come on, somebody has questions to the audience. Chance is willing to give up on you, but I'm not. Okay, great. Well let's wrap up chance, any final comments that you have and then I'll make a couple of final comments myself.

Chancze Lepore (26:00):
Yeah, no, thanks for your time. I appreciate it. Feel free to reach out if you do have questions that come up or just thought about our journey, happy to talk about it.

Jordan Wright (26:08):
That's been one thing that I've been very impressed with these large banks and we work with banks across the gamut, so we have a bunch of smaller banks as well, but I've been impressed at how much they talk to each other. We don't see that as much. Chimes not over there talking to Robinhood all the time about their strategy and what's going to move things forward. So I would encourage you to come talk to Chance if you can. He does have a flight coming up shortly, but Adam on LinkedIn and follow up with him. I mean, I'm surprised at how many backdoor conversations are happening happening on these topics between financial institutions that are talking to each other and finding. So I highly recommend that. I also just want to say thank you for coming and listening today and participating. Appreciate you being here and grateful to be able to be here at the conference. Thanks.