Adyen for Platforms — Part 2 of 4

Onboarding new users with seamless sign-ups

In this guide, you’ll learn:

The importance of onboarding and KYC

3 best practices to kickstart your onboarding strategy

The right onboarding experience for your users

What information you need and when to ask for it

Onboarding, where user experience meets compliance

There’s no better feeling than when a new user signs up for your platform or marketplace. After all the hard work from your development, marketing, and sales teams, a prospect finally becomes an active user and begins making money for your business.

As simple as this moment seems, the sign-up process is actually incredibly important to your business from a regulation and compliance perspective. It also happens to be the first meaningful interaction users have with your platform, so the pressure’s on to get it right.

Done well, onboarding lets you:

	Welcome happy users onto your platform who can start using your services within minutes.
	Satisfy critical Know Your Customer (KYC) verification requirements in one go.
	Keep your platform compliant with global and local regulations.
	Protect your platform from evolving risk trends.

Done poorly, complex onboarding can:

	Be a major roadblock for new users, dissuading them from completing sign-up
	Open your platform to risk by letting in bad actors
	Impact everyone's growth, bottom line, and reputation

“Complexity compounds for platforms, especially when it comes to collecting and verifying KYC information at scale. By investing in an intuitive and automated onboarding process, time and resources can be reallocated to the core business function.”

Karolina Noronha ･VP of Product, Adyen for Platforms

Taking a carefully planned approach to onboarding can help you welcome new users seamlessly onto your platform, while getting all the important details you need to protect your business. The result? Less time managing KYC and more time growing your platform.

In part two, we share how to join the dots with a strong onboarding process that collects the right details at the right time, puts your brand front and center, and scales with you.

The importance of onboarding and KYC

Onboarding and KYC is the process of collecting company or individual details that verify an account holder’s identity. Getting the right information protects your platform from illegal activities and is mandatory for meeting regulation in the countries you do business in.

To avoid onboarding pitfalls like the ones below, it’s important to take the time to design an onboarding process that serves your business and users. This is accomplished through choosing the right kind of experience for your platform, collecting the right information from new users at the right time, and optimizing verification of information.

What a good onboarding process looks like

From the user’s perspective

	Short sign-up process that collects the right amount of information, reducing the time needed to start utilizing platform services
	Guidance on how collected information will be used and safeguarded
	Local languages are supported

From the platform’s perspective

	Decrease in drop-offs during the sign-up process
	Easy compliance with local laws and regulations
	Increased user satisfaction and loyalty
	Establishment of trust and credibility with users
	Reduced burden of management at scale

SKIDATA onboards unlimited users globally

For global access and revenue management platform SKIDATA, delivering a uniform onboarding experience to the hundreds of car parks, ski-slopes, and other access points signing up with them every year was paramount. The company uses Adyen for Platforms to deliver localized sign-up, staggered information collection, and user-friendly UI. Using Adyen’s hosted onboarding page lets the company achieve all of this with little to no developer support, while maintaining compliance with local regulations in over a hundred countries.

Read SKIDATA’s story

Kickstarting your onboarding strategy

Removing enough friction while still getting what you need for verification is the hallmark of a strong onboarding process. The following best practices can help you find the right balance between these two opposing needs. Some are recommendations that are becoming standard, while others are innovations for delighting users. Choose what makes sense for your platform.

Onboarding at a glance: key areas to optimize

Capture details about the individual or business

Create user account

Verify details, such as identity or payout information (KYC/ Customer Due Diligence)

Enable user to start processing payments and receive payouts in their bank account

Keep it conversion-driven

Prioritizing actions that help turn prospects into onboarded users can add up, fast. Just imagine what boosting your conversion rate by a few percentage points would mean for your business. That’s where things like speeding up onboarding from days to minutes, reducing drop off, and outsourcing the burden of KYC management to your payment service provider (PSP) can help.

Tips for reducing friction

Use smart fields and prompts

Smart fields autofill pieces of information like address and zip code. Using them, along with prompts, helps reduce input errors and form drop off. Using automatic field verification (either by connecting with relevant third party databases or a financial technology platform like Adyen) helps reduce the number of simple mistakes.

Hosted Onboarding

It is an out-of-the-box intuitive user interface that simplifies the onboarding process for both the platform and your users. With customizable configurations and tailored onboarding flows, this solution reduces the complexities that come with complying to regulatory requirements and enables sellers to quickly get onboarded and accept payments.

Make troubleshooting easy

Even a highly optimized onboarding process encounters user error or instances when manual review is required. This is when it’s important to have accessible support available for your users (as well as internal insights for your team), so you can resolve issues efficiently.

Tips for reducing user error

Build in FAQs and support help

Embedding support options in your onboarding interface lets users help themselves quickly and reduces frustration at sign up. It’s also important to use onboarding insights to proactively assist users navigating tricky fields, such as a chatbot who can provide answers to common support questions.

Establish form drop-off reporting

This is the best way to figure out why people leave your onboarding process and where they’re getting stuck. Instituting form drop-off reporting helps identify which fields users find confusing and gain meaningful insights on where to optimize your onboarding flow.

Localize your process

It’s extremely frustrating for users when they have to onboard in their second or third language, or through a process that has been poorly translated into their native language. This can be a huge point of friction as you expand into new markets. Localizing isn’t just about translating your process, it’s also about customizing fields based on local best practices. That’s where having a knowledgeable PSP to lean on can help ensure your localized onboarding is optimized.

Tips for making it easy

Localize the language and fields of your process

Localization makes your platform more attractive to new users in corresponding regions and reduces barriers to sign up. In addition to language, it’s also important to ask for the right details based on locality (e.g. Social Security Number in the US, Codice Fiscale in Italy, etc.) Hosted Onboarding simplifies localization and creates a seamless experience for your users.

Build in verification and compliance

Each region has its own regulation, which is why it’s helpful to build in verification with your PSP. Transferring responsibility and operations of keeping up with these local regulations to your PSP lets you reallocate time and resources to your core business.

eBay launched new payments experiences in 30 countries over five months with Adyen for Platforms, thanks to our years of localized onboarding expertise.

View our global solution

Onboarding lookbook

	Basic	Better	Best
Features
Local language display
Smart fields and prompts
Localized onboarding (captures regional requirements in form fields)
Staggered data collection
Data-driven personalization
Chatbot in onboarding interface
Suggestions based on past behavior
Promotional offers served to incentivize users

Basic
The bare minimum, often resulting in higher drop off rates due to the lack of conversion features.

Better
A hyper-localized experience that uses conversion best practices to sign up users faster.

Best
The 'ultimate' onboarding experience that incorporates future thinking features to delight new users.

Choosing the best onboarding experience for your users

When it’s time to create a platform onboarding process for your website and app, you have two options. You can either use a hosted onboarding experience from your PSP or build a custom onboarding experience with your own development resources.

We’ve made it easy to figure out which combination is right for your platform with a short questionnaire. Simply take the self-assessment below.

Onboarding experience self-assessment

QUESTION

What is the desired sign-up experience?

A Straightforward verification compliance

B Full integration into the existing user interface

QUESTION

What development resources are available?

A Minimal development resources available

B Dedicated development resources available

QUESTION

How quickly do you need to launch your page?

A As soon as possible

B Flexibility with launch timeline

Results and Recommendations

Hosted onboarding (mostly As)
Instead of building an implementation to collect and submit KYC information, you have the option to redirect account holders to a hosted onboarding experience provided by your PSP. This is the fastest way to implement KYC verification checks, since it requires less development effort and is managed by your PSP.

Custom onboarding (mostly Bs)
This option lets you use an entirely API-driven approach to build a custom sign-up experience directly into your platform’s existing user interface. It provides a seamless experience for users, since you have complete control over the entire look and feel, but it also requires that you have adequate developer resources.

Hybrid onboarding (even split)
Many platforms and marketplaces choose to mix and match, using a hosted onboarding experience for certain countries and/or verification checks and custom one for the rest. Adyen, for example, offers modular hosted experiences (standalone components that can be used for specific parts of an onboarding flow), so you can leverage our real-time bank and identity solutions as part of your custom onboarding experience.

Choose between a custom, optimized hosted, or hybrid onboarding experience, depending on your business needs, with Adyen for Platforms.

Explore our onboarding options

“We want our customers to love using our service and we want to make it convenient for them to do so. Adyen’s online onboarding and KYC process was a strong selling point for our Payment Facilitation business model.”

Bill Paynter ･Senior Director - Billing & Payments, Viasat

What information you need and when to ask for it

Last, but not least, data collection. While the information you gather is ultimately determined by the legal entity type and the country of the account holder signing up, there are mandatory fields that apply around the world. We’ve outlined these below in our onboarding checklist.

As to when to collect KYC information, you have the choice of a staggered approach (progressive risk-based verification) or to front-load by collecting everything at sign-up. Which approach you choose should be guided, once again, by your business model and users.

Collecting the right information at the right time

	What	Why	When
Contact details	Name Phone # Email	For creating a new user account KYC / verifying contact details AML / sanction screening	A user signs up For B2B services, collect all details during onboarding
Individual details	Individual name Individual address Individual phone #	KYC / verifying individual details	Collect when a user initiates their first transaction
Bank details	Name on account Account # Routing #	KYC / verifying bank details AML / sanction screening	Collect once the first sale is complete and funds are due to be paid out
Photo ID	Driver’s license Passport ID card (government issued)	KYC / verifying documents	Only needed if identity cannot be verified from other documentation

Making payments core to your platform business

A guide to owning the experience from end to end

Part 1

Managing money flows with control and compliance ›

Part 2