There’s a specific frustration that has become near-universal. You need to sign up for something new – a loyalty scheme, a betting account, a utility app – and the process requires completing a form that feels designed in 2009. Repeated data entry, multiple document uploads, a verification email, an SMS code, a selfie that takes three attempts. The whole thing takes eleven minutes and leaves low-grade resentment that wasn’t there when you opened the page.
The frustration exists because a reference point was established. Banking apps – led by the neobank challengers of the early 2010s – showed that identity verification and account creation could be fast, elegant, and almost pleasant. Monzo, N26, Revolut: platforms that built onboarding as a product rather than a procedure. Platforms with demanding regulatory requirements of their own – including spinfin registrieren, which operates under licensed gambling regulations with mandatory KYC obligations – have applied the same logic: verification done once, done well, structured to feel like progress rather than punishment.
What the Neobanks Actually Changed
The traditional bank account opening process required a branch visit, physical documents, and follow-up correspondence that could span weeks. The neobanks collapsed it into a smartphone experience measured in minutes. The regulatory requirements didn’t disappear – KYC, AML checks, identity verification – but they were rebuilt around better technology and design thinking.
The key move was treating compliance as a design problem. Every friction point was interrogated: why does this step exist, what does it verify, can the verification happen with less friction without sacrificing reliability? The answer was usually yes. Document scanning via smartphone, liveness detection replacing in-person verification, pre-filled data reducing manual entry. The regulatory box was ticked with a better experience, not a worse one.
What Users Took Away From That Experience
Once someone has onboarded with a modern neobank in under five minutes, their implicit expectation for every subsequent sign-up shifts. They don’t articulate it as a conscious standard – they experience it as irritation when the standard isn’t met. The gap between what they know is technically possible and what a less thoughtful product delivers reads as disrespect. This is the unintended consequence of excellence in one sector: by solving the problem, the neobanks raised the floor for every category that requires identity verification at onboarding.
The Verification Requirements That Won’t Go Away
Most industries requiring detailed onboarding have legitimate reasons. Regulated gambling, financial services, healthcare – these aren’t demanding identity documents because they enjoy friction. They’re demanding them because the regulatory frameworks impose those requirements, and the consequences of non-compliance are severe.
| Industry | Primary KYC Driver | Key Documents Required | Minimum Acceptable Onboarding |
| Banking | AML / financial regulation | ID, address proof, source of funds | Under 5 minutes – modern standard |
| Online gambling | Gambling regulation, age verification | ID, proof of address | 5-10 minutes – best practice |
| Insurance | Risk assessment, fraud prevention | ID, health data where relevant | 8-15 minutes – variable |
| Cryptocurrency | AML / FATF guidelines | ID, sometimes enhanced KYC | 5-20 minutes – wide variance |
| Healthcare platforms | Data protection, clinical governance | ID, NHS/insurance details | 10-20 minutes |
The table reveals something useful: the best-performing sectors in onboarding speed are those where competitive pressure forced investment in user experience. Banking had neobank challengers forcing the issue. Gambling operators compete intensely for users and have strong incentives to reduce drop-off. Insurance and healthcare, facing less competitive pressure on onboarding, have been slower to invest.
Why Drop-off During Registration Is the Invisible Metric
The cost of a bad sign-up flow is notoriously difficult to measure directly – the people who abandoned the process don’t show up in any database. They simply don’t exist as users. An operator can optimize everything after registration without knowing how many potential users never made it through. This invisibility creates systematic underinvestment in onboarding quality, particularly among organizations that measure success through active user metrics rather than conversion.
What Good Sign-Up Design Actually Requires
The lesson from the neobanks isn’t that verification can be made easy – it’s that the experience can be made human. Regulatory requirements remain real. What changes is whether the process communicates that the user’s time is respected and their progress is toward something worth completing.
Concrete practices that separate good onboarding from poor: front-loading what documents will be needed before asking for them, breaking the process into stages with visible progress indicators, confirming each step with immediate feedback, and – critically – not repeating requests for information the user has already provided. That last one is where most legacy systems fail. Asking for a date of birth twice, or requesting a document that could have been verified from one already uploaded, signals the system was not built with the user in mind. The regulatory requirement may be met. The impression left is not a good one. Banking apps didn’t just raise expectations. They rendered it impossible to feign that poor onboarding is unavoidable. It’s a choice.