The Challenge

EQ Bank had a lot riding on the 2024 Super Bowl, though it had nothing to do with who won the game.

The Canadian challenger bank had targeted the Super Bowl as a cornerstone of its brand fame campaign, which included ads starring actors Eugene and Dan Levy. EQ Bank’s goal was to broaden name recognition and expand its growing customer base.

“We knew this was going to be a big-hitting, nationwide campaign,” said Khamil Alhade, EQ Bank’s growth product manager in charge of the end-to-end onboarding process. “We wanted to make sure the inbound traffic would seamlessly convert.”

The campaign was a natural next step for EQ Bank, which has since surpassed the 500,000-customer threshold and, together with its lending business through Equitable Bank, is Canada’s seventh-largest bank by assets. But growth brings challenges, and Alhade said identity document verification was a key area for improvement during the 2023 preparations for the campaign.

“It was a question of scale,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we were working with a vendor that could scale in an ever-changing digital landscape, especially as we anticipated a material boost in brand awareness and customer conversion thanks to our breakthrough campaign. Two things were nonnegotiable for us in our choice of vendor: We needed someone who could provide a seamless user experience while also offering world-class compliance and fraud detection.”

Replacing a document verification vendor isn’t easy because it requires an overhaul of a major onboarding system. Doing so starting in September 2023 with a December deadline on the cusp of a game-changing campaign took the challenge to an entirely new level.

The Solution

The EQ Bank team started shopping for a new document verification vendor but, ultimately, didn’t have to look far. Trulioo and EQ Bank had joined forces for business verification, and Alhade said the reports showed a simple, strong integration that would make retail onboarding easier, improve Know Your Business processes and connect them to Know Your Customer checks.

He started testing Trulioo Identity Document Verification, trying it on different devices and with diverse background light to make sure the optical character recognition could get a clean scan. Trulioo passed every test and delivered a straightforward, easy-to-use customer experience.

But it was the no-code, drag-and-drop Workflow Studio that really caught Alhade’s eye. 

The onboarding workflow builder gave EQ Bank the flexibility to quickly adjust the document verification process and user experience. It was a priceless feature for a growth product manager who constantly analyzes where customers drop off and how many finish onboarding.

“Being able to make changes to our configuration without having to go through developer cycles was huge to me,” Alhade said. “EQ Bank is committed to delivering product improvements quickly while acknowledging that some changes may take longer. It’s important for us to work with a vendor that understands this and can help us prioritize updates that can be made without needing a full development cycle so we can continuously enhance the customer experience.”

With the decision made, Trulioo and EQ Bank were on the clock. They hit the ground running, knowing EQ Bank had a firm code freeze and if they didn’t complete implementation by then, they wouldn’t know how it performed before going into a visible and hotly anticipated campaign.

The team delivered thanks to Trulioo implementation expertise, the EQ Bank team’s agility and clear risk frameworks, and the speed of Workflow Studio. EQ Bank had a tested, customized document verification system in market that was ready for what was sure to be a dramatic boost in traffic after the Super Bowl.

“That’s about three months to turn around an update to our onboarding journey that can seamlessly accommodate our anticipated growth,” Alhade said. “Our risk teams were close partners as we implemented this new solution, and we were impressed with how Trulioo met our stringent requirements without compromising user experience. That’s pretty intense and pretty great.”

After the final whistle blew at the Super Bowl and customer traffic flooded the digital challenger bank, EQ Bank’s conversion rates held strong, building a foundation for customer growth throughout 2024.

The Results

The document verification success EQ Bank found after the Super Bowl has continued. Trulioo and EQ Bank have conducted ongoing improvements through Workflow Studio that have led to strong early results.

The document verification success EQ Bank found after the Super Bowl has continued. Trulioo and EQ Bank have conducted ongoing improvements through Workflow Studio that have led to strong early results.

• A 10% document verification completion rate increase
• An 89% document verification rate
• A 3% overall onboarding conversion rate increase

“That overall conversion rate is really notable to us,” Alhade said. “Every inch that we can get in making it easier for people to complete the process of signing up for EQ Bank is a huge win.” 

EQ Bank needed a proactive vendor that could work with what the bank had and where it was going, he said, and that collaboration will continue. EQ Bank is exploring more document verification features and other Trulioo services that can strengthen the user experience, fraud protection and Anti-Money Laundering practices.

“As we continue to see the digital banking landscape grow, it’s nonnegotiable that we show up with accessible, easy-to-understand and secure methods for customers to transact with us,” Alhade said. “We’re here to guide our customers into a future that is all digital, but where information safety remains paramount. Technology vendors like Trulioo have helped make this future a reality today.”

Equitable Bank has a clear mission to drive change in Canadian banking to enrich people’s lives. As Canada’s Challenger Bank™ and seventh largest bank by assets, it leverages technology to deliver exceptional personal and commercial banking experiences and services to nearly 700,000 customers and more than six million credit union members through its businesses. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of EQB Inc. (TSX: EQB), a leading digital financial services company with $127 billion in combined assets under management and administration (as at October 31, 2024). Through its digital EQ Bank platform (eqbank.ca), its customers have named it one of the top banks in Canada on the Forbes World’s Best Banks list since 2021.