Metro Bank Onboarding
Banking differently means a usable card in your hand before the plastic is even printed.
Metro Bank’s promise is that it does banking differently, and onboarding is where a new customer first finds out whether that’s true or marketing. The old path made people wait: prove who you are, then wait for a card in the post before the account feels real. We rebuilt the onboarding and identity journey so the proof adapts to the person and the account is usable the moment they finish.
Identity that meets the document
Verification is the point where onboarding usually turns hostile — asking for documents in an order that assumes everyone carries the same ones. So the flow sets the issuing country first and then asks what the person actually holds: a UK, EEA or Swiss passport, a UK driving licence, an EU or Swiss national ID, a biometric residence permit. Each choice routes to the checks that document supports, and nothing else. The unnecessary in-person friction that clung to the old process — a recurring complaint in the commercial research next door — comes out.
People come first, on the app or in a branch. Onboarding is the first chance to prove that, or to quietly disprove it.
A card before the card
The redesign’s spine is a simple inversion: you get a card at the end of onboarding, not in the post. A virtual card is created and dropped straight into Apple Wallet, usable anywhere Mastercard is, before the session ends. The physical card becomes a preference rather than a gate — have it posted in a few working days, or collect and print it at a store the same day. The account is real the instant the customer decides it is.
The redesign closed the gap between finishing onboarding and using the bank — the stretch where new customers quietly go cold. Identity that adapts to the document, and a card that works before the plastic is printed, turn “we do banking differently” from a headline into the first thing the product actually does.