Aug 13, 2026
Fintechs Solved the Decision. It Hasn't Solved Application Conversion.
Results from SOLO's Conversion Scorecard, ranking conversion across top business banking fintechs.
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Benchmark and optimize customer conversion.
Results from SOLO's Conversion Scorecard, ranking conversion across top business banking fintechs.
Benchmark and optimize customer conversion.
We scored six of the biggest names in fintech on their business banking application, analyzing conversion through four weighted categories:
The best scored an 81. The worst scored a 41. Their scores reveal that fintech, despite its many advances as an industry, has yet to solve for compliance and conversion simultaneously, viewing them as competing interests rather than potentially complementary to their top of funnel motion.
SOLO’s team opens accounts with their real business records, start to finish, for an unbiased scoring process.
Each application was timed continuously from start to finish, including any lag time in between document requests from multiple parties to reflect the true experience of a small business owner applying for a financial product in the midst of day to day activities.
Upon conclusion of the application, the experience was scored from start to final decision with the Conversion Scorecard Rubric. The Conversion Scorecard was developed as a diagnostic tool for fintech operators to benchmark their customer conversion compared to industry best practices.
SOLO scored the following fintechs as the first cohort in the Business Banking Category:
| Fintech | Score |
|---|---|
| Square | 81% |
| Flex | 76% |
| Mercury | 70% |
| Stripe | 70% |
| Brex | 67% |
| Ramp | 64% |
| Slash | 41% |
The best application in this category asked for twenty separate data points. Best in class, by our benchmark, is under ten.
The worst application asked for fifty-six fields across fifteen screens, with eight document uploads, two devices, and a required trip to a government registry to buy a certificate and upload it back into the application.
The winner, Square, asked for the least from its user. Twenty fields, eight screens, done in under five minutes. Zero documents. Zero required account connections. Zero follow-ups. Perfect on Application Time. Perfect on Decision Speed.
It also remembered us within the application. We didn't have to rekey name, email, and address three separate times in one session.
However, from the user's side, there was no KYC and no real KYB. Square is likely working with a third party vendor on the back end even if we can't see that from the applicant's seat. That would not be a substitute for the verification artifacts needed to assemble a full CIP record when a regulator requests it. Square’s current process poses a risk that a sponsor bank partner would not be able to afford in a regulatory examination.
Square’s application highlights what is currently a flaw across the industry. Friction related to CIP requirements aren’t solved. It got skipped.
The diligence steps aren't satisfied somewhere else in the flow — as far as what we can see from an applicant’s perspective, they're simply missing with no insight into what information Square may be assessing without their knowledge to determine eligibility.
Although this application may provide a superficially pleasant experience for the user in the first five minutes of their relationship with Square, it creates a risk to both the consumer and Square’s partners. The customer may be required to fulfill the KYC/KYB related friction later at the risk of having their account closed, or may be hindered from scaling their relationship with the platform until they complete additional verification requests. Square’s partners, who would not have the verification artifacts needed to trust Square’s work without requiring the customer to re-do KYC and KYB themselves at the point of accepting a relationship with them. This could harm both the success rate of potential referrals and Square’s own customer relationships.
Slash’s process is, by a wide margin, most comprehensive in this group from a compliance perspective. We anticipate that their customer base rarely, if ever, is at risk of an account shutdown by their sponsor bank due to a failed KYC or KYB check after the account opens.
Unfortunately, the level of customer data collection required to fulfill their policies scored them 41% out of 100.
Fifty-six fields. Fifteen screens. Eight uploads. Two devices. A government database visit that required creating a separate account, paying for a document, and reuploading that document back into the application.
Additionally, almost nothing carried forward — the user uploaded documents containing the exact data the form then asked them to type in by hand. The system couldn't read even the information it had already been handed.
The document pile-up alone took multiple conversations across the team to resolve — sales, the founder, our chief of staff. Twenty-five minutes of pure coordination, and that's after beginning the application prepared.
What it took to clear their CIP:
Despite the poor user experience to complete the application, Slash tied for the best transparency score in the entire group. They were more transparent about their process and CIP tasks than most of the providers that beat them. Unfortunately for Slash, the burden of their policy was fully shifted to the customer. A customer that, in this case, had already provided and verified at least a handful of the same checks with one or more of the other participants in the cohort.
The objective of the scorecard is to help operators diagnose, benchmark, and optimize their own conversion. Cumulatively, these scores become a well balanced frame of reference for what conversion looks like today vs. with reliance, the ability to fully accept another party’s work without repeating it.
SOLO is working with 240+ fintech programs and sponsor banks to operationalize reliance across the fintech and banking ecosystem. The Scorecard was designed specifically for those programs identifying and measuring the impact of reusable verification work on their customer experience and top of funnel metrics.
According to our study of this cohort, a major conversion gap exists today across fintechs regardless of their market maturity and size.
Every one of these fintechs treated the user like a business with no history.
In the course of this review alone, our record was verified by six new fintechs and their sponsor banks. The record existed before the first application. We rebuilt it six times.
However, the customer still starts from a blank form, regardless of how many financial providers have already done the work of verifying their identity and business.
Our work at SOLO is focused on making the customer’s record work for them where it’s needed: at account opening, onboarding, and throughout the servicing of their relationship with a fintech or bank.
By leveraging the data and the work that has already exists on the customer, making it auditable, and surfacing it in the customer experience when it meets new providers standards and policy, SOLO helps fintechs provide an experience that optimizes conversion while meeting higher standards for CIP compliance.
Partner Pre-Fill activates the network you already have. Someone your customer already trusts — who already has the articles of incorporation, already has the EIN letter, already has the financials, already knows exactly who the beneficial owners are — hands them to you. And then you ask that business owner to go find all of it again themselves.
In this case, SOLO builds a customer-gated catalogue of the records your referral partner holds — an index of what actually exists across their systems. When the referred customer applies, they enter a few identifying fields, and the rest gets pre-filled from your partner with their permission. Based on what we saw in this group, that's 40+ fields off a median application.
Partner Pre-Fill is available to any fintech today, regardless of the sponsor bank’s formal participation in the SOLO network.
KYB and KYC Certificates activate our reliance network. Certificates are bank-attested sets of reliance artifacts that let you skip KYB or KYC steps another network member already completed, when their bank attests to it and it matches your policy.
The customer gives you a few identifying fields, consents to share what exists, and the previously completed verification steps disappear from their application path — document capture, biometrics, the selfie video check. All removed. On the back end, the fintech and their sponsor bank receive the examiner-ready artifacts your bank needs to trust the work that was already performed.
The experience is similar to a TSA PreCheck line. The customer breezes through because the work was already done to the fintech and bank’s standard, not because it was waived.
The provider protects every single CIP step, but the customer feels like they're skipping the line: with 40+ possible fields and 8-10 steps removed from their application.
Due to the role the sponsor bank in creating and accepting certificates, only fintechs whose sponsors participate in the network are eligible to implement certificates.
Interested fintechs and sponsors may meet with SOLO to determine eligibility for certificate furnishing and use.
Every fintech in this cohort will receive their full scorecard: the category breakdown, the field-level count, and the specific steps that could be removed and data that could be pre-filled from network records that already exist.
If you weren't in this cohort and would like a diagnostic of your own application process, request your scorecard below.
