How to Eliminate Form Fatigue (and Actually Win Over Business Applicants)

Most small business applications still suck. Whether it’s for a business loan, a merchant account or access to financial services, the process is repetitive and often built around outdated internal systems and not the end user. If you’re wondering why small business applicants drop off halfway through, it’s not a mystery. It’s your forms.

Endless fields. Requests to upload the same document twice. Confusing progress bars, or none at all. These steps don’t add value; they add friction. And they send one clear message: this process wasn’t built with the business owner in mind.

That’s a problem. Because today’s SMBs expect onboarding to be as easy as ordering lunch or applying for a personal credit card. When your process feels like a tax return instead, they bail, taking potential revenue with them. Every abandoned application is a missed opportunity. You’re not just losing a customer, you’re losing deposits, transaction volume and long-term growth.

The benefit of making the process easier for SMBs doesn’t just benefit the end-user experience but it also maximizes conversions and your time to revenue.

The solution isn’t more tech layered on top but rather smarter design underneath. Eliminate the redundant steps. Automate what you can. Fill in the gaps before the user ever sees them. That’s how you create a consumer-grade experience that keeps applicants moving and builds trust from the start.

Why Business Onboarding Feels Broken

Most business onboarding flows are designed like someone copied and pasted a tax form into a web portal. Long forms, unclear instructions and endless fields that ask for the same information twice, sometimes five times. Business owners are forced to upload documents they’ve already submitted, re-enter data you should already have, and guess at what comes next in a multi-step maze.

There’s a persistent (and lazy) belief that this is fine because, allegedly, business applicants expect complexity. But they don’t. That’s just what they’ve been forced to tolerate.

SMBs today run their businesses from their phones. They use Stripe, Shopify, Square and Venmo. They don’t have patience for clunky systems. Traditional financial UX hasn’t evolved fast enough to meet them where they are. This leads to high abandonment rates, frustrated users and a broken first impression that undermines trust before the relationship even begins.

What SMBs Want

SMBs are simply asking you not to waste their time.

That means making onboarding flexible, fast and respectful of the fact that they’re busy, too. Whether they’re on a laptop or a phone, they want the process to work without friction, repetition, or constant back-and-forth. 

Ways to meet this expectation:

• Pre-filled data from trusted sources so they’re not re-entering what you already know
• Saved progress and smart autofill that adapts to their inputs
• Clear instructions and transparency about what’s needed and why
• Real-time verification that doesn’t rely on clunky uploads or manual review
• A cohesive, branded experience that signals you’re modern, capable and ready for their business

This results in:

• Fewer clicks means higher completion
• Pre-filled forms mean less work and faster, more accurate approvals
• Clear progress indicators mean less chances for complications to arise

Consumer platforms changed the game. From Shop Pay to the Apple Card, the best digital experiences today are fast, intuitive and require as little from the user as possible. That bar isn’t limited to ecommerce anymore and it’s shaping expectations across every industry, including business banking.

Small business owners don’t compartmentalize their experiences. If they can apply for a credit card in two minutes, they’re not going to tolerate a 37-step onboarding process just to open a business account. That disconnect is where institutions lose trust and customers.

The truth is: Consumer products won because they respected users’ time. They removed friction. They prioritized clarity, automation and saved progress. That mindset needs to translate into B2B flows, where the stakes are higher and the drop-off risk is real.

Your onboarding doesn’t have to be groundbreaking, it just has to be effortless. And that’s what wins.

The Cost of Form Fatigue

Form fatigue is a growth killer.

Every time a small business drops off your application, that’s potential revenue gone. And it happens more than you think. Nearly 74 percent of potential customers will drop off if the process takes too long or feels overly complex.

And those SMBs that almost converted? They don’t always come back. You might have been this close to onboarding a high-value customer, but your workflow told them, “This is going to be a hassle.” They heard you loud and clear and now may be eyeing another financial institution.

On top of that, your team is now dealing with preventable manual reviews, incomplete submissions, and inbound “just checking the status” emails that wouldn’t exist if your process worked the first time.

Form fatigue slows down your customers, clogs your internal systems, ties up your teams and slows your growth. Fixing should be seen as a revenue strategy.

What Does This “Fix” Actually Look Like? 

If you’re aiming to modernize your onboarding flow, start by removing the usual roadblocks. Get rid of clunky forms and stop asking applicants to upload the same documents more than once. A better experience is built around smart defaults and real-time verification, where business owners only provide information when it’s truly needed. Instead of overwhelming them with everything at once, a progressive flow reveals fields as they become relevant. It’s designed to be fast, adaptable to your institution’s rules and functional on any device. That level of clarity and ease reduces frustration and keeps applicants moving forward.

How Worth Makes It Happen

Worth streamlines this entire process with just three initial inputs: business name, address, and tax ID. From there, our platform does the heavy lifting. Our proprietary crosswalking engine connects to more than 242 million verified business records (including data from the IRS, FinCEN, Secretary of State registries) and other authoritative sources to autofill applications instantly. Instead of relying on guesswork or tedious manual entry, you get structured, verified data delivered in real time. That means no spreadsheets, no back-and-forth and no disjointed data. The result is an application that arrives clean, complete and compliant ready for your SMB applicants.

What That Means For You

When onboarding feels effortless, completion rates rise and drop-offs shrink. Your team stops wasting time chasing documents or cleaning up messy data and starts focusing on what matters: Getting customers through the door faster. Decisions happen quickly, revenue flows sooner, and applicants actually enjoy the experience. Worth helps financial institutions turn a broken process into a competitive advantage, using better data, better design, and better infrastructure. That’s how modern onboarding is supposed to work.

Get a firsthand look at how Worth delivers faster, cleaner SMB onboarding; book a free demo with our team now.