Recovering a leaking account-opening funnel

A retail bank's online account opening ran across several steps, and far too few people reached the end. Completion sat below benchmark and the cost of every opened account kept climbing, but the assumption in the room, that the flow simply had too many steps, turned out to be wrong.

Funnel analysis in GA4 pointed to a single culprit: the identity verification step. Session replays in Clarity and Hotjar showed the same pattern again and again, users stalling on ambiguous fields, with no sense of progress and no reassurance about why sensitive data was being asked for. The problem was not length. It was concentrated uncertainty at the most sensitive moment of the journey.

So the hypothesis was narrow: reduce the uncertainty at that one step rather than strip steps out. The verification screen was simplified, a progress indicator was added, and the copy was rewritten to explain, plainly, why each piece of information was needed. Rather than ship on instinct, the change ran as an A/B test sized properly for significance.

Completion at the verification step rose by around 16%, and abandonment where it had been concentrated fell, which pulled down the effective cost per acquisition. The lesson stuck: in a regulated journey, friction is rarely about how long the form is. It is about confidence. Fix the moment where trust breaks, not the whole funnel.