Virgin Money Case Study: Boosting customer acquisition from 5% to 34%

Telefónica Tech helps Virgin Money boost customer acquisition from 5% to 34% with new onboarding solution

Case Studies | 19 December 2022

Disrupting the market by digitising the client onboarding process

Virgin Money is a leading banking and financial services organisation, operating in the UK.

With over 6.4 million customers and structured around three divisions – personal, mortgages and business – Virgin Money offers a full range of products and services for consumers and small and medium-sized businesses.

The Challenge

Virgin Money is on a journey to disrupt the business banking market with a digital-first approach. That being said, Virgin Money’s client onboarding process forced its customers to go through a time-consuming and very manual process to apply for business banking current accounts. The process resulted in a lengthy waiting period for a decision to be made (due to time consuming manual backend processes) which was causing high customer drop-out rates throughout the process.

With new challenger banks providing fully digital onboarding processes as standard, by not updating its onboarding system, Virgin Money risked losing potential customers, making it difficult for it to hit its ambitious growth targets. Further drivers for change included the need for:

A scalable platform that can, in time, be deployed to other areas of the business
Enhanced customer experience and satisfaction reporting
Reduced turnaround times and reduced effort for agents
Straight-through decisioning for customers (no colleague involvement)
Increases in customer conversion, market share and cross-sell.

Virgin Money took a proactive approach – to not only compete, but lead the market with a fully digital client onboarding process in order to increase its overall market share. It put together a taskforce for change, its objectives being:

To disrupt the market with an intuitive, flexible and automation-led digital client onboarding platform for business current account applicants
To create a digital marketplace for existing customers
To transform the current onboarding process.

The Solution

Telefónica Tech has been working with Virgin Money since 2017 on numerous digital transformation projects to revolutionise its business banking operations and offerings. The relationship spanned the Covid-19 pandemic when Telefónica Tech provided Virgin Money with critical process automation support for high-priority Covid response projects, following the introduction of government-backed loan schemes. As a result of previous project successes, Telefónica Tech were Virgin Money’s partner of choice to support the implementation of its new client onboarding solution.

Telefónica Tech worked with Virgin Money in the discovery phase to imagine what a redesign of its current process would look like with Microsoft technology. Building on their existing usage for Dynamics 365 for Sales within Business Banking, Virgin Money liked Microsoft Power Platform because of its ability to be quickly changed and updated – making it easily adaptable to accommodate any changing requirements.

Benefits of Power Platform:

Out-of-the-box functionality allowing for the integration of different systems
Low/no code nature allowing for quick delivery times
Good configurability providing the ability to react quickly and seamlessly to change
Enterprise-grade technology which provides security, accessibility and resilience
Configurable extensions such as digital signature, Power Automate and Power BI.

Following discovery, Telefónica Tech’s team of financial services technology experts built, implemented and launched a best-in-class client onboarding platform for Virgin Money, providing maximum automation, minimum customer input and an enterprise-level automated decisioning process for new-to-bank clients.

The Virgin Money branded online portal built with Power Platform (Power Pages, Power Automate, Model-driven apps and Power BI) and integrations to Virgin Money’s banking systems and third-party credit decisioning platforms allows prospective customers to:

Search and find their company information via Companies House
Add additional information (reducing the need for post-application information requests)
Apply with an instant approval or rejection response
Receive and access their real-time automatic bank account details and online banking profile.

The Key Results

Customer acquisition has grown 580%* since implementation and continues to grow, due to a faster and more user friendly application process. *(Acquisition increased from 5% to 34%)
Digital approach has internally saved time and money due to less back-office employee involvement.
Huge increases in straight-through application (no colleague involvement), with an average journey time being completed in 10-25 minutes instead of days/weeks.
50% of customer accounts are now opened within 5 days of applying.
20% of customers are being onboarded and underwritten with a wholly digital experience.
With better reporting, Virgin Money can continue to identify bottlenecks and dropout rates, incrementally improving the client onboarding journey.

Due to the success of Virgin Money’s client onboarding project, Telefónica Tech was awarded Financial Technology Partner of the Year at the Scottish Financial Technology Awards 2022.

In addition to the unique offering for the market, the onboarding project allowed Telefónica Tech and Virgin Money to accelerate agile adoption. This has resulted in a system that enriches over time through continuous improvement, learning and adaptations. The size and scale of this project allowed both organisations to recruit, adopt and implement agile practices in what was, historically a waterfall environment. Working together to develop an agile ways-of-working that succeeds across a wide range of departments, stakeholders and settings, the agile adoption for both Virgin Money and Telefónica Tech has become the gold standard for running projects across both organisations.

Customer Quote

“

“The Microsoft Power Platform offering, implemented by Telefónica Tech, has been game–changing for Virgin Money’s position as a leader for small and medium-sized businesses within the finance industry.”

Wilson Ferguson

Senior Digital Development Manager, Virgin Money