Case file · Banking

UAE Acquisition

Three screens from the banking acquisition app: face recognition, debit card customisation, required documents

Thesis

A business account application that already worked on the web, rebuilt for native mobile. A company can complete onboarding in about ten minutes, with owners anywhere, and without a bank employee ever meeting anyone.

The hard part was never the form. Regulation requires that every qualifying owner is verified and signs, and owners are rarely in the same room at the same time. The UAE has identity infrastructure that makes this solvable without anyone travelling: a government gateway confirms who a person is, and face recognition pulls their passport details automatically. The journey is built around getting each owner to that gateway wherever they happen to be, rather than getting them all to a branch.

My role

Sole designer on the mobile product, end to end. The brief was to bring NEO BIZ Express from web to mobile; I owned that entirely, including the customer portal, which on mobile lives inside the same app. You apply and you track in one place.

The internal review system used by bank staff is outside this scope, and isn't described here.

What's in it

Chapter — Mobile Onboarding Journey: the full journey, EFR identity retrieval, remote verification for absent partners, the dashboard structure, the two ownership paths, and the tracking layer.

Currently one chapter. The case file is deliberately narrower than Egypt's, because my scope here was narrower.

Results

Live in production for over a year and a halfAchievedVerifiable
~10 minutes to complete an applicationAchievedReal journey time; 25–30 minutes for complex cases with many partners
Under one business day to open the account, sometimes same dayAchievedProduction behaviour
Thousands of new business accounts via the digital journeyAchievedReported internally; covers web and mobile together, so no number is attributed to mobile alone

Three ways in

If you want the decision I'm proudest ofremote verification. Every Key Individual must verify and sign, but only one person applies. I proposed pushing verification to the person instead of asking that person to come in, which took the in-person meeting with a Relationship Manager out of the journey. The Relationship Manager still owns the relationship; what went away was the appointment.
If you want a common misreading correctedEmirates Face Recognition here is not a security gate. The government gateway already verifies the Emirates ID. EFR exists to retrieve the passport and supporting details automatically, so the customer doesn't have to upload them. If it fails three times, they upload a passport and continue as if it had succeeded.
If you want to see judgement under constraintthe arguments I lost. Native share instead of email, rejected in favour of official channels. UAE Pass, rejected on cost. And cutting the regulatory section, which I proposed here and in Egypt, and lost both times.

Mobile Onboarding Journey Read start to finish

Sibling case files

Same bank, same regulatory requirement, a market without the identity infrastructure, and a very different answer.