Digital-only challenger banks
Digital-only neobanks, such as Chime and Varo, were born online and have no legacy technology infrastructure to drag them down—but also no branches to fall back on. For that reason, they have been forced to focus on their digital customer experiences, including account opening. And these digital upstarts are on the rise: There will be 28.9 million US digital-only bank consumers with at least one account in 2021, per projections from eMarketer. That number is expected to hit 47.5 million by 2024.
Big tech companies
Apple launched a credit card in 2019, and despite shunning the label, Venmo is looking increasingly like a neobank. Meanwhile, Google’s “Plex” bank accounts—Google digital user experiences built on top of accounts provided by incumbent partner banks—are slated for a full rollout this year. Between their deep existing relationships with hundreds of millions of consumers—and the data advantages those relationships bring with them—and their ability to design top-of-the-line digital user interfaces, these companies threaten to completely realign consumer expectations of what digital account opening should look like.
Third-party solutions vendors
Banks have a choice when they implement their DAO solutions: They can either choose to design their own solution, or they can turn to third-party providers to supply some or all of the pieces of the process. Interest in collaborating with fintechs to tackle DAO is very high. Asked how interested their institution would be in fintech partnership for various capabilities, 29% of financial institutions said they were already handling DAO through such partnerships, and another 42% said they were “very interested,” per Cornerstone.