Radius, a $1.1 billion asset bank headquartered in Boston, has been on a dedicated track to become an online-only retail bank since Mike Butler took over as CEO about 10 years ago. But Butler and his executive team knew that Radius’ customer acquisition and onboarding process was inefficient. The demand was there, but the bank’s internal onboarding processes couldn’t keep up, and the attrition rate was high.
Overhauling that process led Radius to Brooklyn, New York-based Alloy, a firm still in its relative infancy. Butler and the Radius board of directors knew that this was a risky play because Alloy was still a young startup company and they would be entrusting it to digitize its customer onboarding process, a critical move that aimed to make the process more efficient and reduce drop-offs. The bank had to bring together several departments, from data to marketing, and get them all on the same page.
It had to be just right to make their model succeed—and so far it has worked. The bank has reduced its technology cost to open an account by 50 percent, and seen a 30 percent increase in its application conversion rate. Radius also has seen a steep downward trend in fraudulent account openings, an issue that’s become increasingly prevalent with online banking.
But even with significant technology investments and improvements, there was still considerable human productivity invested in some of the bank’s core functions. Some 30 to 40 of every 100 incoming retail account applications were being tapped for manual review. With some 1,000 applications coming in each week on average, the calculus there is pretty clear about the expense the bank faced with reviewing those applications. Alloy’s technology automates much of the review process using decision engines, and has reduced that manual review by 98 percent.
Alloy’s technology automates most of the process and has reduced dropped applications on the consumer side and the human capital expense for the bank. Now, just three or four of every 100 applications on average are pinged for manual review.