Powering a new era in commercial onboarding

Today’s financial disruptors offer sleek digital experiences to win over customers in the face of growing regulatory complexity and higher customer expectations. That’s why financial institutions need to streamline their entire customer journey to keep those customers on board, starting with frictionless onboarding.

However, as all three guests on a Business Reporter FintechTalk session agree, partnering with experts with the experience and tools to guide financial institutions through transformation projects – while avoiding the pitfalls – can make running such a big project smoother, less complex and far more likely to be a success.

 

Challenges
Asking customers, often repeatedly, to manually submit large amounts of information are an unavoidable reality of onboarding. It’s something that, as Angela Norman, Managing Director of the Yorkshire Building Society points out, can create friction and introduce errors right at the start of the customer journey. 

Another mistake banks often make is to overlook the importance of integrating customer due diligence and KYB/KYC processes into the customer journey. As a result, they can miss where the friction points are in terms of capturing and processing customer data. 

To address this, both internal and external processes need to be brought together, which will result in not only smoother workflows and enhanced customer experiences but also make compliance more straightforward. The key to success is that every stage of the transformation project is centred around the customer journey rather than the regulatory obligations of the bank. 

Efficiency with a human touch
Process optimisation and automation, says Norman, are not about replacing people but enabling them to focus on value-added customer interactions and processes that require the human touch. She explains that the efficiency streamlining generates at Yorkshire Building Society frees up staff to devote more time to high-value, face-to-face interactions with customers. This approach enables organisations to grow efficiently while also maintaining a customer-first approach.

However, while automation and data utilisation can free up time for employees to address real customer needs, some processes – for example, commercial lending – can never be fully automated, as the lender will always want to know the full story behind the company. This is where the human touch can play a key role. 

The power of partnerships
Should banks feel daunted by the complexities of a transformation project? Yorkshire Building Society is currently going through just such a process; Angela Norman explains that banks can partner with companies that specialise in this area of onboarding and compliance and just piggyback off their years of expertise.

Anyone who thinks they can build the level of knowledge that an organisation such as nCino has developed over years of experience of working with different lenders, through direct experience of what has and what has not worked is, believes Norman, deluding themselves. “I’m absolutely working with people who can help on our journey,” she says. “I’ve worked with nCino for many years in other organisations as well. I’ve seen firsthand the level of care and diligence the nCino teams apply to making sure anything that’s implemented is done to bespoke standards rather than as one-size-fits-all.”

 

Driving speed and reducing risk
The most transformative, and obvious, impact of automation is increased efficiency – automated workflows can be completed in a scant fraction of the time they previously required. But there are also hidden benefits, such as a reduced risk profile, that are just as significant.

Indeed, optimising onboarding processes has more benefits than financial institutions realise. It’s a multi-purpose business case that’s about eliminating risk as much as it’s about optimising efficiency and creating capacity. By replacing disconnected, manual processes with integrated, automated workflows, you can streamline client lifecycle management and effortlessly acquire, onboard, originate, monitor, retain and grow your client base.

 

Getting the onboarding system right for the first time should be a top priority for any organisation. Once that’s done, continuous in-life monitoring means the system can automatically incorporate new customer information and changing circumstances, staying on top of risk and protecting both the organisation and its customers.

 

A wealth of applicable experience
nCino has seen banks make plenty of common mistakes over the years. For example, if another project is running while an onboarding automation project is in progress, it’s key that the two projects communicate with each other to achieve better outcomes and preserve resources.  

 

Some processes, which might at first seem to make more sense as manual ones, are often little more than bottlenecks created by how regulations were originally interpreted by the bank’s policies. It’s often worth revisiting manual processes such as these, to see whether they can be automated without causing any compliance issues. 

 

Although the importance of onboarding is often overlooked by banks and financial institutions, a streamlined onboarding process can transform an organisation and improve both compliance and the organisation’s relationship with both customers and regulators.