IO Onboarding
I'm so stoked to share this! This flow was a big collaboration between my team (Cards) and our underwriting, marketing, and creative products folks—they all brought people, valuable expertise, time, creativity, and energy to come up with a personal, delightful, and efficient onboarding flow for our new IO accounts.
As usual, there was some interesting product complexity here. Let's dive right in.
To start, most folks who don't yet have qualifying balance histories (this is our first credit product, so we're starting with a secured charge card—it's lower risk, but at the cost of some balance constraints) will see this. We worked with our Growth and data folks to learn how Mercury customers set up their accounts, and found that wires were some of the more common methods. For those who haven't sent a wire before, it can unfortunately be complicated. Many banks make it pretty difficult to find and execute a wire, and wires can have some technical fields that folks unfamiliar to the process might not immediately understand what to do with. For some consumer banks, particularly neobanks, wires may flat out not be supported at all!
Linking an external account is often a more natural option—people are generally familiar with Plaid, and because the transfer is endogenous, we can handle some of the complexity of initiating a transfer for customers.
Once a deposit is initiated, or when a qualifying deposit has been made but our underwriting team is reviewing an application, we have a "pending" state. There's a few variations of the above screen based on what's happening with a customer—we wanted to be as clear as possible throughout the process about next steps, and what's going on behind the scenes.
One of my favorite details here—the "protip" section in the bottom left—was a contribution from our excellent content designer Shawn. We tried to pull in a concept from video game loading screens to give folks some actionable items and fun facts if they came back to this screen while we were still processing things.
Once a customer's been approved, they jump right into account setup. Since IO is a monthly charge card, the full balance needs to be paid at the end of a statement period—to make that easy, we have folks set it up when they're creating their IO account. The balance graph motif was pulled in from the credit dashboard, and some key details (inspired from the Apple Card setup screens) give applicants all the information they need to move forward at a glance.
Since a card program is only as good as it's ability to help you pay for things, the final step in IO onboarding is issuing a physical card for yourself. We're able to simply confirm a shipping address and set a card spending limit (independent from your credit limit, as you can issue as many IO cards as you need!) then make the card available right in this screen.
One of the coolest parts about IO for me is our approach to physical card design. Rather than printing sensitive information on the card, we keep it to just the cardholder name and business name. This lets us immediately activate your card (but keep the physical card locked) so customers can start spending right away, even while their physical card is being shipped.
That enables magical moments like the above, where customers can onboard and start spending in under a minute, all from one screen.
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I hope some of this product thinking and background was interesting! If you also want to do a deep dive into cards and financial products, and figure out how to make them great (so cool companies can focus on cool stuff, not financial stuff), we're hiring senior product designers!
