Digital Mobile Onboarding in Switzerland – a Hands-on Experience

Traditional methods of acquiring commercial subscriptions, e.g., mobile communication contracts, involve a face-to-face negotiation for detailed contract options and, especially, customer identification based on passports or identity (ID) cards.This paper reports on the experience gained of the fully digital onboarding process to acquire a new mobile subscription, in which the goal was to design and implement an application publicly available to customers of Android and iOS devices. A straightforward process on how people acquire new SIM (Subscriber Identification Module) cards and the amount of money needed to pay for the subscriptions was designed. As a result, the elimination of paperwork required, when creating a new subscription with a provider, the removal of costs for ordering a new SIM card, and the offering of flat payments without any hidden costs to compete with major service providers was reached. The architecture defined was used for the application and run in a real world use case.