With Yodlee AccountOpening, financial institutions can reduce the risk associated with opening online accounts, increase the number of accounts successfully opened, and provide a superior online experience for customers.

"The reality is that opening an account online today is not easy, and nearly 70 percent of accounts opened online never get funded," said Peter Hazlehurst, senior vice president of product development at Yodlee. "We realized in looking at the problem that our technology could dramatically simplify the process and reduce risk. AccountOpening is a natural complement to our AccountVerification and FundsTransfer solutions, providing an elegant and complete offering."

Yodlee AccountOpening enables financial institutions to use their website, self-service branch kiosk and other channels to open new accounts and fund them immediately through an automated process that links credit databases, normalizes data and creates a dashboard in real-time so institutions can immediately assess risk for any consumer opening an account.

"Online account opening will play an increasingly important role within the retail banking industry as banks continue to look for lower cost channels to acquire and service customers, and geography becomes less of a deciding factor on where consumers bank," said Dan Schatt, senior analyst at Celent, LLC. "Consumers value quick and convenient solutions. The ability to open and fund an account seamlessly without sending in a physical check or interacting with a branch teller or call center representative provides a solid consumer value proposition."

How it Works

A typical online account opening process involves three key components:

1. Verification of account ownership
2. Initial (as well as ongoing) funding of the account
3. Identity verification

Yodlee already addresses both real-time verification, via its AccountVerification product, and account-to-account money movement, via its FundsTransfer product. The third piece: identity verification, leverages Yodlee's patented data gathering techniques to check external database sources, matching as many components as required - including address, phone number, driver's license, social security number, credit record, etc. - for a complete, real-time 'decisioning dashboard' for the financial institution.

The three integrated components together make up Yodlee AccountOpening - the most complete and customizable account opening solution available. AccountOpening enables financial institutions to seamlessly gather all required data from new customers and complete their initial deposit or product purchase transaction all in the same session, decreasing abandonment and increasing transactional revenues.

Flexible Deployment Options

Because each financial institution has its own unique process for handling account opening, Yodlee offers multiple options for deployment. Financial institutions can deploy Yodlee's solutions as a fully outsourced ASP solution or only select the components needed. Alternatively, financial institutions can use the developer-friendly software developer kit (SDK) to write their own user interface for branch, kiosk and phone channels. Yodlee AccountOpening will be available Q2/2006 and comes with Yodlee's professional services expertise to ensure a fully integrated, customized account opening solution.

AccountOpening joins Yodlee's suite of financial solutions, which includes BillDirect for revenue generating electronic bill presentment and payment, OnCenter and FundsTransfer for personal financial management, AdvisorView for wealth management, and AccountVerification for risk management. Today, there are over seven million consumers using Yodlee-powered services at many of the leading bank, brokerage, and portal sites, with more than two million accounts refreshed/updated via the Yodlee Platform each day.