Sixty-eight percent of European consumers walked away from a financial application last year before finishing it, according to Signicat's 2022 survey of more than 7,600 applicants across fourteen countries. That's the highest abandonment rate the report has ever recorded.
A fintech website redesign usually needs to start there. Not with a new color palette, but with the moment a prospective customer decides the form in front of them isn't worth finishing.
Why Onboarding Friction Is the First Redesign Signal
The average applicant now gives up after 18 minutes and 53 seconds, seven minutes faster than the 2020 average of 26 minutes. People aren't more patient. They've just learned to cut their losses sooner.
The reasons they gave were split evenly: the application took too long, it asked for too much personal information, or it demanded identity documents they didn't have to hand.
Ninety-two percent said they're worried about how a financial provider uses and protects the data it collects. Often nobody explained why a given field was mandatory in the first place.
None of that gets fixed by restyling buttons. It gets fixed by mapping the actual flow, cutting fields that don't earn their place, and explaining the ones that stay.
That's a job for UI/UX work done before a single screen gets designed. It's exactly the gap our piece on fintech wireframing basics walks through in more detail.
Accessibility Gaps Are a Legal and Revenue Problem
Contrast and structure matter just as much as the form itself. WebAIM's Million report, covering the top one million home pages as of February 2026, found that 95.9% still carry detectable WCAG 2 failures.
Low-contrast text was the single biggest offender. It showed up on 83.9% of the pages checked.
For a finance site, that's a page a customer with a vision impairment, or simply an older customer squinting at a phone in daylight, cannot read the balance on.
| Signal | What was measured | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| Onboarding abandonment | European consumers quitting a financial application (Signicat, 2022) | 68% |
| Accessibility failures | Top million home pages with WCAG 2 failures (WebAIM, Feb 2026) | 95.9% |
| Digital sales share | Bank of America client sales completed digitally (2024) | 55% |
Fixing contrast and heading structure is unglamorous work next to a visual refresh. It's also the part of a redesign most likely to be visible in a lawsuit.
Creative work that respects contrast ratios from the first draft avoids relitigating the whole visual system after launch.
When a Fintech Website Redesign Actually Pays Off
Photo by StartupStockPhotos on Pixabay
Bank of America's clients completed 55% of sales digitally in 2024, a record for the bank.
That scale didn't happen because customers had no other option. It happened because enough of the experience worked well enough that people stopped defaulting to a branch or a phone call.
Your customers aren't comparing your site to a competing bank's. They're comparing it to whatever app they used this morning, and a clunky finance site loses that comparison badly.
Once onboarding is fixed and the page reads cleanly for everyone who lands on it, the next question is what happens after someone converts.
Losing them to a generic drip campaign is its own failure. That's why follow-up that doesn't feel automated matters as much as the redesign that got them there.
Start with the flow that's losing people today. Everything else on the page can wait until that one is fixed.
Cover photo by Julio Lopez on Pexels
Sources
- The Battle to Onboard 2022 — Signicat
- The WebAIM Million — WebAIM
