Designing a digital white-glove onboarding experience

How do you keep high (and ultra) high net-worth individuals engaged in a lengthy, repetitive and quietly invasive account-opening process?

You design a mobile-first digital conversation that keeps prospectives moving forward quickly, increasing their trust, confidence and investment to completing the onboarding process.

The problem


The process of 'prospecting' and onboarding private banking clients is a typically-offline process, taking an average of 6 months for clients to initiate the process of becoming a client within the north America region.


However, once a client verbally expresses the desire to open a private bank account, the disjointed security verifications that the private bank's regulatorily mandated to complete becomes a source of frustration for prospects, with up to 80% of prospects withdrawing from the onboarding completely.

To open an account, prospects must have a minimum of $10M of investable assets to open an account, so failed onboarding for many clients represents a revenue, reputational and productivity risk from a commercial perspective.

Introducing the voice of their future 'digital concierge'

We transformed dense legal documentation into a guided, transparent experience — confirming pre-filled information first, explaining what clients were signing in plain language before showing the document itself, and using personalised, concierge-style pacing ("John, please take a moment") to acknowledge that these are decisions worth pausing for. Full regulatory compliance, with none of the intimidation.

Securely simplifying essential data capture

I led a workshop with fellow content designers to define the core principles that'll ground future content decisions:

Continuously progressing through each step

Outcomes

I designed

A streamlined digital onboarding experience for prospective private bank clients, ensuring they feel supported and guided through each step through an intuitive UI.

User pains

  • Repeated paper forms, repetition of details already previously provided

  • No assurance of how personal data would be handled

Business pains

  • Up to 80% drop off rate

  • Lost revenue and high operational cost from failed prospect conversion

  • Reputational risk, compounded by pressure from competitors and challenger banks

Impact (metrics)

  • Onboarding down from 2+ weeks to minutes (with an easier collection of prospect data and improved internal processes)

  • Up to 8 paper-based forms consolidated into 1 digital experience with each check completed in an average of 3 minutes

Released

January 2026 (pilot)

Disclaimer

I've structured case studies to remain compliant with IP and confidentiality obligations of my former employers. I've expressed any metrics as percentages or directional improvements. Any internal documents have been recreated and I have not included any names of of stakeholders, figures or other proprietary system details.

Next project

Building a scalable conversation response framework (CRF)

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