A large North American credit union opened roughly five times as many accounts in its first month live.

The credit union was opening under two hundred consumer accounts a month online. Prospective members who started an application often did not finish it, and every approved applicant still had to set up online banking separately afterwards. The industry norm for a digital account opening sits near five minutes; the target was to beat it without loosening fraud controls.

I led the program from architecture review through risk, compliance and core banking integration to launch. The platform spans roughly twenty integrations: identity verification, address validation, credit data, payment rails, ACH form requests, the core banking system, and a hand-off into online banking that passes every captured field so a new member only creates a user ID and password.

Straight-through decisioning and fraud controls were designed to decide the large majority of applications automatically and route only the ambiguous ones to bankers, so speed for genuine applicants and accuracy against fraudulent ones moved together rather than against each other.