Outlier Briefing: Best practices in digital onboarding with Ted Brown
- The move to digital banking has focused on customer acquisition.
- Today's guest explains why onboarding -- what happens after a new account opening -- is even more important.

Welcome to Tearsheet’s Outlier Briefing. This subscriber-only event is exclusive for our Outlier members. We go deeper with subject matter experts, to take actionable steps that can impact your business and practice.
Today’s expert is Ted Brown. He’s co-founder and CEO of a company called Digital Onboarding. He’s been in fintech for his entire career. His first company, Andera, built the first way to open up a bank account online. Now, his firm Digital Onboarding makes sure those people who opened up accounts become engaged, profitable relationships.
Takeaways
- abysmal attrition rates: why attrition rates of new customers are stubbornly high in banking (over 90%) when accounts are opened out of footprint
- a pamphlet and a prayer: Typical onboarding experiences at banks and credit unions are likely to fail — Brown calls this the “pamphlet and a prayer” strategy. After an account is opened, many banks just send new customers some brochures and hope they stick around. There’s little rigor or structure around onboarding.
- what top FIs are doing to improve onboarding rates: automation is important here but most of the time, smaller financial institutions struggle to implement good marketing automation programs.
- how onboarding is evolving and the role of technology to create engaged clients
Listen to an abridged version of the briefing
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