We are ready to roll out the next phase of onboarding clients

Good news - we've successfully completed our early onboarding period and are now ready to go public and scale our behavioural retail bank up in phases. Here's the latest.

For those wondering why the early onboarding phase took longer than expected, we found it vital to check and recheck due to the sophistication of our underlying systems and the complexity of the task.

Our digital bank has over 120 distinct and connected systems. In order to ensure that these systems integrate properly and create a seamless experience for our clients, we needed to get four structural factors in perfect working order:

1. The integration of full-scale digital banking functionality for clients within the Discovery ecosystem - in other words, we needed to ensure that all the different products and features "speak" to each other properly.
2. The systems and technology infrastructure - this is the backbone of all banking operations, after all.
3. The rewards architecture - so that our clients can earn and enjoy all their rewards from the get-go.
4. The migration of existing Discovery Card holders - to make sure that the clients in the first phase is experiencing an effortless transition to their new accounts.

Sophisticated structures beneath make for a seamless interface up top

Discovery Bank is mobile-first and deposit-led, and offers clients sophisticated lending capabilities from the get-go. As you can imagine, building these systems was uniquely complex, as the systems need to bring together all the functionalities you'd expect from a traditional bank and interweave this with advanced digital system capabilities, Vitality incentives and Discovery Health systems. These integrated systems took an incredible 1.5 million hours to build!

We're focused on dazzling our clients

But it was all worth it in the end. The insights that were revealed in the rigorous onboarding phase have put us in a strong position to deliver a uniquely disruptive behavioural banking solution with the aspiration that it takes no more than three clicks to complete any task.

A prime example of this user-friendly consumer experience is our proprietary Smart Onboarding process, where both existing Discovery Card clients and new clients without credit are fully onboarded, compliance-checked, and transacting immediately - all in under five minutes!

So, what is the next step in onboarding clients?

We plan to onboard 1 000 clients per day by the end of August 2019, and scale further from there. While our existing Discovery Card clients will get first priority for onboarding, we're super-excited about the substantial show of interest from non-Discovery clients, and promise to make contact with every one of you!