This week’s featured identity innovator: Brian Swanson from Axos Bank

12-10-2019 by Mike Sasaki

Our first featured identity innovator is a great friend of mine, Brian Swanson, EVP, Head of Consumer Bank for Axos Bank. Brian and I recently sat down in our beautiful city, San Diego, to discuss his approach to implementing identity verification in banking — and his views on the future of digital onboarding. Brian’s perspective is truly unique because Axos was one of the pioneer online-only banks in the world.

Since Axos has always been an online bank — and only an online bank— Brian and his team have never had the opportunity to have face-to-face interactions with their customers in order to verify that they are who they say they are. Every action their customers take comes from their digital channels. The access and convenience make it possible to optimize conversions create a seamless onboarding process — and the anonymity has made it extremely important to verify their identities very quickly.

But in addition to the user experience/security dance we discuss so often in this space, I was particularly interested in Brian’s thoughts on the customer journey and how often his team considers that journey. They make constant adjustments to their flow to ensure that no single point of failure creates a dead end and that they give the right consumers the right offer at the right time. This road map helps them to optimize conversions on their digital channels even more. And though identity verification plays a small piece in their onboarding process, it allows them to ensure the user meets their criteria to open an account.

Optimizing the customer journey in this way is a trend I am starting to see among many of our customers … and the team at Axos has really perfected this approach in a very disciplined and logical way.

To hear from Brian, check out his identity innovator videos or read our Q&A.

Video 1: Creating a frictionless experience

Video 2: Using identity verification or the future of digital onboarding