How we built a business account you can open without ever visiting a branch

The regulator's requirements were real, and the bank's compliance and control team was right to hold us to them. The account owner had to be seen in person by a member of staff. A long list of documents had to be supplied. Many forms had to be filled in and signed.

Our design rule came from that: never try to get around a requirement. Ask what it is for, and build a digital way to meet that purpose. Every decision that followed was tested against it.

We took each requirement the compliance and control team raised and designed a digital check to meet it, one by one. That turned a branch visit into a set of building blocks: identity, location, references, documents and signatures, each with a clear pass or fail and a clear status for the owner.

It also made the platform easy to defend. For any rule, there was a specific feature that met it.

The hardest requirement was that the owner be seen. We used liveness checks, technology that confirms a real, live person is in front of the camera and not a photograph. It wasn't a mainstream idea in 2019, and it became the backbone of the whole flow.

A bank has to know a business is where it says it is. We partnered with a company that verifies addresses physically, so the owner never has to leave the house, and the finding flows straight back into the application with no manual re-keying.

Two references were required, and in the old way each one meant paperwork at the bank. We built an electronic reference system connected to the national payments infrastructure. A referee can submit a photo of their details, or receive an automated email, attach a digital signature and have it land directly in the application.

Every form, every document and every signature moved onto the screen, in one connected flow with a clear status at every step. For the owner it feels like one conversation. For the bank it is one complete, consistent application file.

When it went live, the effect was immediate: the bank's rate of account opening more than doubled. What had always needed a branch visit was now something an owner could do from a phone, in their own time.

A good foundation gets reused. The bank used the platform for large national enterprise-support programmes, and through that infrastructure it opened millions of accounts. Those programmes brought billions into the bank.

The lesson I took from it: build each building block to stand on its own, and the platform can serve a use you never planned for.