How our technology enables simpler onboarding

4 min read|Published November 07, 2019

A key to simple onboarding is removing any unnecessary friction in your user journey. Tink can help do that by automatically filling in forms for customers, so they can skip the manual work and get started more quickly. Our solution uses account aggregation to retrieve the relevant data straight from their banks – and it can be easily implemented in a matter of minutes.

Say that you are signing up for a new financial advisory app. But to get started, you’re asked to type in all your accounts’ IBAN and Swift numbers. So you need to log in to your banking apps and do a copy-paste manoeuvre, or worse, scramble for banking papers you haven’t seen in years. No thanks.

Tink solves this problem by instantly pulling up the details from the users’ bank accounts – with their permission, of course – and completing the application on their behalf. Without them ever having to leave the app they’re signing up for.

This may seem terribly simple – maybe even obvious. But getting this solution to work properly requires a solid foundation. In other words, the right tech.

Verified, real-time financial information – autofilled

This solution is possible thanks to Tink’s account aggregation technology, which is able to fetch a broad range of personal and financial details straight from users’ bank accounts. This could include identifiers (such as name and date of birth), bank account numbers, and information on loans, mortgages and investments.

The type of information being retrieved naturally depends on the context. Some scenarios – such as setting up a direct debit payment – require a user’s bank account number, whereas others may require a social security number, or investment-related details like an ISIN-number. If the bank can provide the information, we can fetch it.

So no matter what service your offer, the onboarding can be simplified. With no risk of typos as a bonus.

Since the data comes from verified financial institutions, it can always be trusted to be valid and accurate. The data can then also be enriched so it's ‘cleaned up’ and presented to users in a clear, easy-to-read format.

In the background, our aggregation technology is underpinned by our connections to over 2,500 European banks – and compressed into one API.

When a user authenticates with their bank – a process that can be done in seconds – we are able to pull the relevant financial information, and then package it into the application form. Onboarding done, happy new customers.

Simpler onboarding that’s easy to implement

If you’re wondering how to start using this solution, it’s easy. You can get started and manage it all through our configuration tool called Tink Console.

After you sign up for the Console, you’ll be automatically guided to create an app in your account, allowing you or your tech team to put our API to work in a matter of minutes. In Console, you can also access Tink Link, our front-end SDK for end-user authentication, which lets you implement customer authentication flows with one single line of code.

This solution is widely applicable – it can autofill information to simplify onboarding in many types of digital or consumer-facing services, and not just in financial or banking contexts. In the end, what it does is make the onboarding process go unnoticed – instead of it being the reason to lose a customer.

In the last part of this article series, we will go into how our partners have used autofill to smoothen out their onboarding processes — and how the solution can be used beyond the financial industry.

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