Fintech NerdCon didn’t feel like a conference. It felt like someone finally cracked the code on how operators want to learn: sleeves rolled up, laptops open, ideas colliding green juice and neon wristbands.
It set the perfect stage for our session: Onboarding OS: building personalized workflows for fintech.
Trust isn’t a gate you pass — it’s a system you build
We opened the bootcamp with one core idea: Speed doesn’t create trust. Structure does.
Teams want faster onboarding, but one-size-fits-all flows tend to be:
- Too rigid for nuanced risk
- Too manual for lean teams
- Too generic for different types of customers
This is where personalization comes in. Not personalization for marketing, but personalization for risk, growth, and efficiency.
Mapping onboarding personas (for real use cases, not theory)
We then walked through how different customer types warrant different onboarding flows — because their risks, signals, urgency, and expectations aren’t the same.
Attendees mapped personas such as:
- Marketplace sellers onboarding quickly with volatile volume
- First-time founders forming new entities
- Older SMBs with thin digital footprints
- Franchise operators applying outside business hours
People weren’t pulling personas out of thin air — they referenced real customers and trends from their teams. The takeaway was simple: If your customers aren’t the same, their onboarding shouldn’t be either.
Designing tiered workflows
Next, our team broke down what adaptive onboarding looks like in practice:
- Tier 1: strong digital presence, verified business data → automated verification
- Tier 2: missing or inconsistent signals → document requests + manual checks
- Tier 3: high-risk attributes → enhanced due diligence
Teams at each table compared how their own systems work today — some rely heavily on business age, others on web presence, others on EIN validation or UCC history.
The point wasn’t to find the “perfect” workflow. It was to show how signals, automation, and judgment work together when onboarding is treated as a system.
One small experiment to test before the end of the year
To make this actionable, we closed with a simple challenge: Pick one personalization experiment you can ship soon.
A few ideas that came up:
- Using entity age as an automated fast-track signal
- Creating a second verification path for higher-risk segments
- Reducing manual reviews for digitally verified businesses
- Testing messaging targeted at first-time founders
- Adding domain or web presence as a trust signal
Keeping the conversation going at The Trust Club
After the session, people stopped by The Trust Club pop-up — our retail-inspired booth — to pick up exclusive items and continue the conversation. We heard everything from “Our manual reviews doubled this year” to “We’re trying to automate tiering for the first time.”
It wasn’t a high-stakes brainstorm, but rather a space where operators could compare notes and understand how others are approaching similar challenges.
Want to go deeper?
If you’re rethinking your onboarding flow or exploring ways to personalize verification, we recently partnered with American Banker for a full session on this exact topic.
📺 Watch the recording: Personalization or Perish: How adaptive onboarding systems will define 2026
It breaks down:
- The signals that matter most
- Where teams are losing (or leaking) trust
- How tiered onboarding actually works in practice
- What we’re seeing across 879,000+ UCC filings
- And how the best fintechs are adapting workflows in real time
If you missed our NerdCon session, this is the perfect place to start.
