top of page

User Churn in Banking

This is a discovery research project I conducted for Wave Financial. Wave is an all-in-one financial management solution for small businesses, and the newest addition to this solution is a business bank account. The data indicated that there was a steep dropoff rate of ~25% three months after signup to Wave’s bank account, and the objective of this research was to understand what was causing churn in this three-month timeframe.

Background and Goals

The product team needed to understand what was causing turnover in our target users, as well as what could potentially prevent turnover, in order to make roadmap decisions for the next quarter and beyond.

Strategic Objectives:

  • Discover users’ current processes/decision-making about Wave Money, and how they feel about the overall experience

  • Learn about people’s current pain points, frustrations, and barriers when using Wave Money and how they would improve it

  • Understand if there are certain motivators we can implement to bring back at-risk and churned customers

  • Evaluate how users are currently interacting with Wave Money

Method

Since this research involved understanding attitudinal data, and the objective of the research was exploratory, I decided to conduct user interviews to understand themes and patterns then size and quantify the opportunities with a supplemental survey.

User Interview Objectives:

  • Understand what important user needs and wants our bank account was not fulfilling

  • Understand what purpose users had in mind when signing up for our bank account

  • Gather more insight into what attracted them to signup initially, and what fell short

  • Uncover the underlying motivators for signing up with our business bank account

Survey Objectives:

  • Size the common frustrations and reasons given for churning from our bank account

  • Size the common delighters and reasons given for signing up for our bank account

  • Get an understanding of what our target user base found important and unimportant when assessing the features of a business bank account

Crucial Insights

Users of our banking product were churning at the three-month mark because we were lacking in our communication to them at crucial points in their interaction with the product.

 

After signing up for our bank account, users felt blindsided by certain rules and regulations that they felt weren’t expressed to them at signup, including what types of legal business structures are eligible for Wave banking, and being restricted to one bank account per person, attached to one business. 

 

Once users were in the banking app, they struggled to figure out how to do basic tasks, such as depositing money and finding their accounting and routing numbers. Help or instructions weren’t easy to find, and so they found themselves not wanting to bother with completing their banking setup.

 

Users were frustrated by the lack of support offered by Wave when a problem with their account came up. Wave’s customer service representatives are only available via web chat from 9-5EST, leaving large swaths of time where users cannot access live support. Many users felt that they didn’t want to keep their money in a bank that couldn’t always help them when they needed it.

 

For additional findings and learnings, please contact juliepmtoth@gmail.com.

Research Impact

Product Impact:

  • Help Center articles for the most commonly asked questions were embedded directly into the Wave Money dashboard design

  • The design team added more educational text into the onboarding flow of the product

Strategic Impact:

  • ​The customer experience team created new customer service flows to address some gaps in our offering

Stakeholder Collaboration Impact:

  • UXR became a key strategic partner to the banking team 

  • New connections were built between Wave’s UXR, Data, and Marketing teams

My Learnings

  • Make sure to get a good understanding of what stakeholders are looking to do with this research before beginning the project

  • Involve stakeholders as much as you can: the more of the process they see, the higher their buy in to the findings will be

  • The way research is presented can make or break your case, and may need to be altered for each audience you present to

bottom of page