Frost Bank lifts digital account openings with Blend

Frost Bank has adopted Blend's digital account-opening platform for deposit accounts, lifting online application completion rates by 60%.

After the change, completion rates for digital account applications rose from 50% to 80%, while manual reviews fell from 15% to 3%. Customers can now open accounts in as little as six to seven minutes.

The rollout expands an existing relationship that began on the lending side. Frost had already used Blend across home equity, mortgage, and consumer loan products before extending the system to deposit account opening.

Frost ranks among the 50 largest banks in the United States by assets, with more than $53 billion, according to the announcement. Digital account opening is a key channel for attracting new customers.

"Blend gives us confidence that we can continue to drive new customers to the online channel because we know they will have a great experience," said Brad Bremer, SVP of Consumer Deposit Products at Frost Bank.

Existing partnership

The deposit account project followed earlier work on lending products. Customer feedback on those implementations helped inform the decision to expand the partnership.

"Customer growth is our number one metric for success, and the digital account opening channel is incredibly important for us to meet our strategic goals," Bremer said.

Katie Keating, EVP and Director of Consumer Products and Strategy, tied the move directly to the bank's earlier experience with the software.

"As we rolled out Blend on our lending products, we saw really great customer feedback and success," Keating said.

"That first foray on the lending side gave us the confidence to move over to deposits as well."

Operational shift

The drop in manual review marks one of the clearest operational changes from the new system. The share of applications requiring manual intervention fell by 80%, easing pressure on internal processing teams while reducing friction for customers.

Frost also reported an increase in its Net Promoter Score for the account-opening journey, rising from 90% to 94% in the first months after launch. That suggests the changes affected not only completion rates but also customer feedback on the process itself.

For Blend, the Frost deployment adds a large regional banking name to its digital origination software business. The company provides account-opening and loan application tools to banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders.

"Blend's job is to make sure that when a customer starts an application, they finish it, and that when they finish it, they want to come back," said Nima Ghamsari, Co-Founder and Head of Blend.

Use of data

Frost is now focused on using platform data to refine the customer journey over time. Visibility across the full application process is shaping how the bank identifies areas for improvement.

"A lot of companies today are drowning in data but starving for insights," Keating said.

"Having a digital onboarding platform that gives us insight into the journey from start to finish is going to help us derive takeaways that will make the customer experience better and better over time."

The account-opening process has become a critical battleground for banks trying to win customers through digital channels, particularly as consumers compare experiences across current accounts, savings products, and lending services. Faster onboarding and fewer abandoned applications can directly affect customer acquisition, especially for institutions that want to shift more sales online without adding staff-heavy review processes.

Frost described the account-opening journey as the first contact many customers have with the bank. Its decision to modernise that process for deposits, after earlier lending work, reflects how banks are increasingly trying to create more consistent digital journeys across product lines rather than treating each application process as a separate system.

Blend said its role is to support that end-to-end process from application through completion. For Frost, early results include a 30-point increase in the share of customers who start and finish a digital application, alongside a drop in manual review requirements from 15% to 3%.