How we built Meridian's onboarding experience
Rebuilding account opening from a 14-minute, 38%-drop-off form into a three-minute experience that doubled completion.
Challenge
Opening an account meant eleven screens and roughly fourteen minutes of typing. Compliance requirements had accreted over years into a form nobody enjoyed, and 38% of applicants abandoned it before finishing.
Research
We watched twenty first-time users attempt the existing flow, instrumented every step of the funnel, and mapped each regulatory field to whether it was genuinely required at signup — or just there out of habit.
Strategy
Defer everything not legally required to open the account. We committed to progressive disclosure, instant inline validation, and capturing ID documents with the camera instead of manual entry.
Process
We rebuilt the flow screen by screen behind a feature flag, shipping weekly prototypes to a panel of real users and rolling out to 5% of live traffic before any full release.
Decisions
We chose on-device camera OCR over a third-party SDK to keep sensitive data off external servers, and collapsed eleven screens into five by merging steps that always happened together.
Results
Completion more than doubled and time-to-open fell by three quarters, while the support queue for onboarding issues effectively emptied within a month of launch.