Rethinking the onboarding experience

Redesigning the UX to add a free pdf to excel conversion.

If you need to convert your PDF bank statements into excel you want to be sure its going to work. The two big questions from potential users have been; will this work for my bank and how is my data used?

“Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand.”

- Confucius

Adding a free option.

Asking you to register and choose a subscription before seeing it work is too much to ask. After all I had tried a bunch of other bank statement converter services with mixed results. They all had limitations, either requiring some manual input or failing on edge cases. Bank statement conversion software needs to handle a surprising number of edge cases.

Now you can try it out and process one statement for free every 24 hours without needing to register.

While the initial design was ok, I figured if i'm going to add this new option in I should give things more of a fintech feel.

While I liked the feel of the hero image it wasn't adding value. I replaced the hero image with a standard upload area I wanted it to be intuitive that you can drag and drop a PDF. Putting the PDF image in the middle was to add a visual queue so its fast to recognise that this is a PDF upload area.

"no credit card required" and "free trial" are centre screen to address friction points up front.

Some users wanted to see it convert a bank statement to excel before handing over their data. So I added a synthetic bank statement.

Security is priority number one.

Bank Statement data is rich with your information. I take security seriously. I don't use synthetic statements for testing, I test each release with my bank statements. Adding an anonymous free upload option required adding lots of checks and balances.

Automatic Deletion. All data gets deleted 7 days after upload. This has been the approach since the beginning to avoid creating a giant honey pot of data.
Restricted Access. Anonymous uploads are restricted using your browser session, IP address and upload uuid.
Temporary Users. Sessions expire after 2 hours, after which your free upload is no longer accessible.
Exceptional Support. If you don't want to wait the 7 days for the automated removal contact me. I will manually remove all traces of your data.

Before you couldn't access the document view until the processing had finished. In the free upload it redirects the user to a processing page. I wanted some motion at the top of the page so the user knows something is happening. I also wanted it to be very clear how your data is kept safe. Naturally this required some clear error states so that the user knows what is going on.

How is your data used?

I make use of the raw data in the PDFs. First I extract the positions of the individual characters. Then I reconstruct the text to analyse the layout of the document. This only works with original bank statements issued from the bank. Currently it doesn't work with scans of statements. Adding OCR (optical character recognition) is on the roadmap.

The types of text in the headings of bank statements is used to locate transaction tables. Currently we only support statements in english. If you need something custom contact me with your requirements and I will see what I can do.

OCR looked appealing at first. It proved complex to get a high enough accuracy without training a custom model. This is hard for a variety of reasons, but that's a post for another day.

Your data is your data.

Even though AI is really hot right now i'm just doing boring old document layout analysis. None of your data gets used for training models. All of your bank statement data gets deleted after 7 days.

How is the free bank statement processing option working?

So far it's promising, people are trying the free upload out.

First 25 days of being live:

167 users to the site.
3 users register.
0 users add their payment details.
0 users upload documents.

Three days with the free upload:

38 users to the site.
1 users register.
0 users add their payment details.
13 users upload documents.
8 users used the synthetic statement.

I'm pretty happy with that as a first step to fixing the customer acquisition funnel.

Now we wait and see.