Every brokerage we've audited has the same chart: a vertical cliff between signed up and funded. The drop-off correlates almost perfectly with the time-to-first-trade clock.
The math
A 14-day KYC backlog converts 22% of signups to fundings. A 90-second KYC converts 78%. That's not a tweak — it's a different business model.
Why legacy KYC takes so long
- Manual document review (often outsourced to a third-party BPO)
- AML screening run as a nightly batch, not on demand
- Address proof requested after the user has already left the app
- Sanction checks done by a separate vendor with a 48h SLA
What "under-90-seconds" looks like
Modern KYC providers — Zauthy, Onfido, Smile ID — collapse the entire chain into a single in-app flow: live selfie, government-ID scan, OCR + biometric match, AML screening, and sanction check, all returned in under a minute.
A real number
When we migrated one client from a 3-day to a 90-second KYC, monthly funded accounts went up 3.4× without changing a single line of marketing copy. That's how big the cliff was.