Open banking brings a variety of financial services to customers, but at the same time, challenges the way they think about these services. Customers are now required to provide access to their accounts if they want to start using various innovative services. And we strive to make this access more secure and transparent by using open banking and PSD2 initiatives. To help your customers in adopting open banking-powered solutions, it is critical to ensure a smooth and intuitive user journey.

With this in mind, we’ve been racking our brains to find ways for making the user journey as seamless as possible, while meeting all the regulatory requirements. Throughout the last 18 months, we’ve accumulated feedback from our clients and their end-customers on the best journey of connecting a bank account via Salt Edge. And after careful considerations, we’ve set a roadmap of improvements – part of which is already implemented in the newly Salt Edge’s bank connect widget V3. 

What is the bank connect widget? It’s a set of interfaces where end-customers choose their desired bank from which they want to share account information or initiate a payment toward a third party, and where they grant their consent for the corresponding action.

Salt Edge bank connect widget as part of the payment initiation user journey

To promote engagement, understanding, and ensure adoption, we’ve followed 4 important user experience principles, to varying degrees: trust, security, transparency, and speed. 

So, let’s take a look at what’s new!

Optimisation of bank search

Earlier, when a user would type in a bank name, they would get a pretty long list of matches, with no specific order of branches by country. While this worked well for finding a small bank in the list, a new approach had to be implemented for searching banks that are part of big multinational groups, Unicredit being a good example of that. 

Now, even before typing in the bank’s name, the user is presented with the most popular banks from the country they are located in, based on geolocation data. And if the desired bank is in that list, the journey gets greatly shortened – following the ‘speed’ user experience principle. Otherwise, the user continues the journey by typing in the bank name and a list of all the branches sorted by country or group is displayed, in the case of a multinational bank.