Fintech onboarding — building unique end-to-end client relationship

The events of 2020 have disrupted the way we work and forced financial organizations to rethink and accelerate their digital transformation journeys.

Today’s clients expect omni-channel experiences that are seamless every step of the way — from streamlined onboarding to easy loan applications and painless M&A processes. The pandemic has merely highlighted this trend which has been shaping up for years and is here to stay. As clients shift to virtual interactions, it’s paramount that your digital experience is just as engaging as your in-person interactions. How financial institutions create personalization through business-critical processes will be instrumental to their success at retaining and bringing on new business.
Winning in the digital-first world means finding the right technology to move your organization forward.

Financial services firms are on a digital journey across the globe, and some parts of this journey have been more seamless than others. Firms are increasingly aware that streamlined, pain free onboarding builds the foundation for a successful client experience throughout the duration of a client’s lifecycle. Primarily, a digital experience adds convenience and a competitive service for the client.
Despite ranking highly on the agenda for all financial institutions, not all firms have been able to achieve a fully digital onboarding process. A ‘user- friendly and frictionless’ onboarding experience may be the ideal, but it means overcoming great technological, infrastructural, cultural, regulatory and commercial hurdles to achieve it.

In this article I explore how onboarding pain points are increasingly frustrating digitally-native clients, the role that data and information management play in meeting smooth onboarding goals, and efforts being made towards what the industry describes as onboarding nirvana, based on a 360 degree view of the client.

Understanding the needs of the corporate client and delivering highly personalised, efficient services has not seen the same level of rapid uptake as the retail space. Onboarding is clearly understood as the gateway to business growth. The objective is to welcome the client and ensure that the client has an easy and user-friendly experience.
Many organisations systematically miss this objective for three reasons:
1. The onboarding design is incorrect or incomplete: it frustrates the customer. It creates friction points, where the customer leaves out frustration or confusion.
2. The onboarding technology stack doesn’t deliver: typically, this happens when the AI solutions are incorrect because they are not suited for the tasks or are not supported by the infrastructure.
3. The organisation still puts their products ahead of their clients: historically, the industry has focused on selling products irrespective of what the client needs or wants. As AI permeates every layer of the institution, it enables organisations to offer service personalisation. This is the core point where the onboarding design and technology stack fail because they are not designed to deliver service personalisation. When organisations select a suitable AI stack to deliver service personalisation, that is when they design great onboarding processes and build long term relationships with their clients.