Meet Salt Edge’s updated bank connect widget, marking the year of user experience

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.

By adding these search optimisation algorithms, 83% of our beta testing group, which was made up of thousands of end-customers of several clients, declared having found their providers much faster than before. To put it in simple words, the success rate of users connecting their accounts is expected to increase by 18% with the new version of the bank connect widget. 

✔️ Improved user experience

The design of bank connect widget V3 is mobile-friendly, which greatly reduces users’ operations like zooming and scrolling when browsing the interfaces. The slick and easy-to-use mobile interfaces could make a real difference in the success of digital commerce, instant lending experiences, and not only, as nowadays the use of mobile devices increases in popularity and become the dominant way to surf the web. In 2021 mobile phones generated 54.25% of the global traffic, while desktops reached only 42.9%. 

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart”, said Nelson Mandela. We resonate with these words and strive to translate Salt Edge interfaces in all languages, offering global connectivity with a local touch. Now the widget’s interfaces are available in 10 more languages, including Croatian, Slovenian, Slovak, Dutch – counting a total of 24 languages. Offering end-users the possibility to choose their native language gives a sense of familiarity and they start to resonate with your brand.

Another important improvement made to ease users’ experience was simplifying the content on pages, including by using simpler, more direct, and friendlier language.

🛡️ Increasing safety and trust during the user journey

One of the PSD2’s key priorities is to enhance user security and trust in digital banking solutions, be it through the use of strong customer authentication or the switch to a more secure bank connection method – open banking APIs. A sure thing is that for end-customers to adopt new services, they need to feel in control at every step of the journey. Following the ‘trust’ and ‘transparency’ user experience principles, we’ve designed interfaces that signpost users to where they are within the process.

Based on the same principles, we’re now offering our clients the option to incorporate a digest overview in the account information journey. This is an interface located at the end of the journey showing end-customers a summary of what information was fetched and from which accounts. This is a way of reassuring them that the information which is being processed conforms to the granted consent, thus increasing customer’s trust and credibility in the client’s brand.

Greatly emphasising on security, we’re providing hints on the type of bank connection, messages about encryption and Salt Edge’s state of the art security measures that meet the highest standards set by leading financial institutions. 

We aim to assist businesses both at offering a strong local experience and also at growing internationally, giving them all the necessary tools for that: secure connections to thousands of banks globally, interfaces translated into many languages, a seamless user experience, and more. With all the implemented optimisations, also including better handling of errors, advanced filtering, clear instructions especially for first-time users, the success rate of end-customers connecting their accounts will greatly increase. 

There are several exciting things in the pipeline that are now being tested together with our clients.

Stay tuned, more interesting updates are yet to come!

About Salt Edge

Salt Edge – a financial API platform with PSD2 and open banking solutions. The company has two main vectors of activity: enabling third parties to get access to bank channels via a unified gateway, and developing the technology necessary for banks to become compliant with the directive’s requirements. ISO 27001 certified and AISP licensed under PSD2, the company employs the highest international security measures to ensure stable and reliable connections between financial institutions and their customers. The company is integrated with 5000+ financial institutions in 50+ countries.

More information: www.saltedge.com
Phone number: +1-437-886-3969
Email: press@saltedge.com