Onboarding 2.0: How Financial Services Firms Can Improve Customer Experience for Institutional Clients

It is often said that first impressions are the most important and long lasting ones, and that personal opinions are formed in a few moments. In today’s increasingly digitally driven business world, the onboarding process usually serves as the first impression for financial services firms and their institutional clients. The subsequent client experience is a crucial factor in the client lifecycle and lays the foundations for what will hopefully be a long and fruitful partnership.

Historically, however, many financial institutions have not viewed the onboarding process of clients as a key business differentiator. Onboarding was mainly seen through an operational lens and, at best, treated as a risk and compliance overhead. This is in stark contrast to the retail banking sector, where onboarding has become a key differentiator and is viewed as a vital area of investment required to keep pace with the competition and to appeal to millennials’ click-based mindset.

The treatment of onboarding as a purely operational function has led to a lack of investment and management focus, resulting in many processes that are highly manual and sub-optimal. A move towards online processing, the advent of disruptive technology, increased regulatory pressure, changing client behavior and expectation, and the need to trim operating costs have put client onboarding towards the top of financial services businesses’ priorities.

Download our white paper to learn how financial services firms can improve their onboarding experience for institutional clients—without compromising compliance and risk management controls.