How Saxo Bank offers seamless top-up payments for investment accounts

September 25, 2023 | Louise Basse

On a mission to make curious people invested in the world, Saxo Bank is one of the leading online trading platforms connecting investors and traders to global financial markets. To smoothen up the process of funding investment accounts and thereby boosting conversion rates, Saxo Bank recently teamed up with Mastercard’s open banking platform in Europe.   

Now, Saxo offers seamless top-up payments directly embedded in the investment platform. In that way, customers can instantly fund their account with open banking payments in a smooth and intuitive way – and as a result, Saxo has quickly improved conversion rates for its investment customers.   

To explore how they did it, we sat down with Saxo’s Chief Experience Officer, Camilla Dahl Hansen. So – get comfy, grab a coffee, and see what she said.    

Removing friction, boosting conversion rates   

 We all know the struggle of making a manual bank transfer: Logging into the online bank, typing in long digits manually, authorizing the payment, and waiting for the payment to be complete.   

Before implementing open banking payments, Saxo Bank’s customers often found themselves in that long and complex process when they tried to top up their investment accounts with funds from their primary bank, Camilla Dahl Hansen explains:   

“The payment experience was complicated and time consuming. Our customers were unsure of how to top up their accounts, and they often worried about how long it would take for the money to arrive to the Saxo account,“ she says and continues:   

“That was an issue of both trust and uncertainty because making a transfer seemed difficult, and customers were never sure about what steps they had to take to fund their Saxo account.“  

Ultimately, that impacted conversion rates. And without any funds in their investment accounts, fewer investments were made.   

 That’s why Saxo Bank teamed up with Mastercard’s open banking platform in Europe. With open banking payments in place, Saxo customers can top up their accounts directly in Saxo’s platform:    

“With the new open banking solution, Saxo's customers can fund their investment account more or less instantly. When you’ve topped up your Saxo account through an open banking payment, you see the money in your Saxo account right away and you’re instantly ready for your investment adventure,” Camilla Dahl Hansen says and emphasizes:   

“I’m happy that this is such an intuitive solution that is easy for our customers to use. The results of the collaboration have been manifested by the fact that conversion rates have already improved with the new open banking solution.”   

An open banking platform with a proven track record   

If you ask Camilla Dahl Hansen who’s in charge of Saxo Bank’s customer experience across all markets, there’s no doubt that the new open banking solution has made Saxo Bank more competitive in the investments space:  

”Before, a fraction of our customers were dropping off the platform even though they wanted to invest. But that is no longer the case with embedded open banking payments, so I’d definitely say that the solution has given us a strong advantage in the space.”  

 For Saxo Bank, it was important to find an open banking partner with the same ambition and direction as Saxo Bank and with a proven record of accomplishment when it comes to delivering scalable solutions to major financial platforms. And that’s why they chose to work with Mastercard:   

 “It was also important for us to have a true partnership where we work together on how we build a good solution that will cater to our different needs and create a win-win together. We’re super positive about the partnership because we’ve collaborated with the same intention and wanted to go in the same direction from day one,“ she concludes.   

If you want to catch up with more inspirational use cases, head over to our open banking knowledge hub where you can find a wide range of open banking use cases.