Most consumers likely to abandon a financial services application after 15 minutes
More than two thirds of consumers will abandon an application for financial services if it takes more than 20 minutes to complete, according to a survey of 3,500 adults in Northern Europe by digital identity company Signicat. Some 40% of the respondents said they would abandon the application if it takes more than 10 minutes, suggesting most people lose patience around 15 minutes into the process.
The research identified the most common sources of frustration for applicants as the amount of personal information required (cited by 31% of respondents) and the length of time the process takes (cited by 28%). About one third of respondents believe financial service providers aren’t making sufficient use of biometric data to speed up the onboarding process.
Indeed, new forms of biometrics, beyond fingerprint scans and facial recognition, are beginning to emerge. Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo have come up with a way to use the unique geometry of an individual’s ear canal to identify them, according to a report by Digital Trends. Seeking a form of biometrics that would be difficult to spoof, the researchers developed EarEcho – off-the-shelf earbuds equipped with a microphone that faces the wearer’s ear canal. “When a sound is played by the earphone’s speaker into the user’s ear, the sound propagates through the ear canal and is reflected back to the built-in microphone in the earbud,” Yang Gao, a graduate student who worked on the project, told Digital Trends. “By analysing the acoustic information of played sound and captured echo, which is highly related to the ear canal geometry, we extract the unique features from the user and then verify the user’s identity.”
For more information, see the Signicat press release here and the Digital Trends article here