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.

• 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
• 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:

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

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.