© SOLO FINANCE INC. 2026
Solutions
© SOLO FINANCE INC. 2026
A study of customer conversion across the industry today vs. backed by a single source of customer data built and maintained by the industry.
It’s assumed today that fintech has cracked the code on high conversion experiences. Real consumer experiences tell a different story.
What is the real state of customer conversion across the industry?
We’ve analyzed some of the most popular fintech products in the most prominent financial categories to determine who’s really getting conversion right, where experiences are falling short, and where collaborative data could create a true fast-pass like experience for good actors to close the gap from good conversion to best in class.
The Conversion Scorecard is an industry wide diagnostic on the success of customer experience of applying to financial products through the lenses of both humans and agents.
We graded live account-opening experiences across leading fintechs and banks on a 100-point scale spanning four weighted categories:
SOLO is a customer data-sharing network. We work with the country's leading sponsor banks to help their fintech programs meet rising regulatory standards while optimizing conversion — without compromising one for the other.
To identify and measure success, we’ve onboarded real customers across hundreds of fintech products. We developed this consistent way to diagnose the conversion experience today vs. where fintechs and banks could leverage collaborative data from a trust network of 240+ programs to safely skip steps in the account opening flow without jeopardizing compliance. That diagnostic is the Scorecard.
In making those findings publicly available, we’re shedding light on the opportunities that still exist for even the top providers to deliver higher conversion experiences even in raised bar CIP environments.
Findings are released one category per week, beginning with some of the most prominent names in the industry. Future installments will continue to be added to the rankings for each category as the series progresses.
Small Business Banking
Installment 01: Mercury, Brex, Stripe, Bluevine, Flex(One), Slash, Meow
Consumer Checking & Savings
Installment 01: Chase, Current, SoFi, OnePay, Ava
Business Payments
Installment 01: Stripe, Square, Ramp, and Navan
Consumer Payday & Lending
Installment 01: LendingPoint, Dave, Upstart, ClarityPay
Trading & Investment
Installment 01: Robinhood, Coinbase, Acorns, Betterment, Wealthfront
Through our diagnostics of programs like Current, Robinhood, SoFi, Mercury, Ramp, and more, one concept became clear:
Even when friction is eliminated within a single application, the customer still experiences a significant amount of repetitive tasks and requests that accumulate across relationships.
Without a shared record, every relationship starts from zero.
The same identity gets checked at every provider - multiplying the burden on consumers.
The same documents get uploaded in multiple places for the same purpose.
The same steps are repeated by compliance teams across institutions (sometimes, at the same institutions) that could have been fulfilled by trusted work that’s already been done to standards.
Customer experiences do not exist in a vacuum. The average consumer holds at least 9 financial relationships at a time. Every repetitive across providers ask jeopardizes conversion when a customer approaches the fintech in an already crowded landscape.
The Scorecard measures a question the industry has never answered with a common instrument: can you convert at the top of the funnel without giving up ground on compliance?
Most institutions treat conversion and risk functions as opposing forces. Growth teams want more customers through the door; risk teams want tighter checks before they’re welcomed in. The prevailing assumption is that you trade one for the other — raise the compliance bar and lose applicants to friction, or lower it to convert more and multiply risk. The Scorecard is built to test whether that tradeoff has to be real, or if conversion can actually be improved by high fidelity verifications when shared amongst the industry without imposing a single standard for each player.
Besides solving for how to fast pass good actors, there is an additional cost to balance: the threat of bad actors taking advantage of frictionless UX.
Fintechs spend significantly on acquiring, onboarding, and provisioning high intent customers to send them through the same onboarding flow as potentially bad actors. Without a mechanism to catch and compliantly deliver adverse action on bad actors early in the funnel, the friction meant to catch fraud slows down the good consumer. As standards for CIP, KYC, and KYB rise, that cost continues to compound — which is why measuring where the friction actually sits, what it costs, and what role it actually serves matters now more than ever.
Our results indicate that conversion is most often compromised in the verification steps that are necessary for compliance and risk teams. However, we are measuring whether that has to be the case.
The SOLO network exists to make verified identity and verification work reusable across a network. Similar to a TSA PreCheck experience — verify once, reuse many times — an institution can raise the bar and reduce friction for customers in the same motion. The Scorecard delivers the conversion data product and compliance teams need to determine whether or not that solution is a successful match for their onboarding and account opening UX.
About: SOLO supports a TSA PreCheck experience for consumer and small businesses. When a step is already satisfied and backed by a certificate the network can produce, fintechs can skip with a network certificate. Sponsor compliant checks backed by regulator-ready artifacts enable a top of the line customer experience.
