By Steuart Bruce, Principal, Banking and Financial Services
Everyone can probably relate to this scene in one way or another. But What exactly does this have to do with client onboarding for banks? While, it may be surprising to hear, but bankers especially can relate to Shrek’s pain in this scene.
Just like how Donkey was eager to arrive at the Far Far Away Kingdom, banking customers are eager to complete the onboarding process and use their banking services.
To quiet customer questions, banks need to have an efficient, transparent onboarding process. We encourage our partners to leverage enterprise content management tools that create four levels of visibility into the onboarding process so their customers don’t have to ask how much longer? or is the process done yet?
Client Onboarding For Banks(COFB) Level 1 – Estimate to Complete
Front office workers (sales, associates) do not typically concern themselves with the nuances of the bank’s processes. Their focus is on the end result. When clients ask can I trade in our account? and were my payments made on time?, the ability to see their ETC is crucial.
The ETC (estimate to complete) is a key metric that predicts when all of the tasks will conclude. It is based on the complexity and historical performance of the onboarding process. For instance, if a client signs up for five new treasury products, the ETC leverages the longest approval/implementation period to calculate the number. This metric allows the associate to manage the client’s exception, set an expectation for the client, and inform the back office of the process goals.
COFB Level 2 – Key Issues in Client Onboarding for Banks
What happens if you face a delay? If a client’s ETC date is quickly approaching, but the process slowed down, the bank must take action. Each onboarding situation has many dependent and parallel activities simultaneously occurring, such as funding after account opening or unrelated treasury products implementing in parallel. If the back office can view all of these activities in a visual dashboard, they can quickly identify where the bottleneck is.
COFB Level 3 – Operational (In)Efficiencies
On an even larger scale, there’s the management team’s visibility into operational efficiency in the client onboarding process for banks. Three key pieces contribute to coordinating efficient operations:
- Workload Planning: When management has information on the volume and type of work expected in their area (the pipeline), they can appropriately allocate their staff to accomplish the work.
- Issue Resolution: When key activities fall behind and could adversely affect the ETC (and customer satisfaction), management attention is paramount. Actionable dashboards highlight these areas of concern.
- Trend Analysis: Dashboards that show the productivity of the users, adherence to the ETC, product performances, and more help management fine-tune the process and adjust.
COFB Level 4 – Electronic Data Warehouse
The final level of visibility banks needs to have to ensure a pleasant onboarding experience is into the traditional electronic data warehouse activities (EDW). EDWs provide long-term audit-ability for the processes and long-term trending analysis. Audit-ability helps banks follow all processes and more importantly, shuffles regulators on to your competition. Long-term trending analysis enables banks to perform year-after-year reviews on processes, products, performance, and staffing. These reviews empower banks to make strategic changes and updates that keep them ahead of the competition.
By having visibility into these four different levels of the onboarding process, you can improve customer service and the process as a whole. This means the scene from Shrek can stay as a movie scene, instead of a painful representation of your own life when it comes to client onboarding for banks.
Are you there yet? If not, check out our Pyramid eXpeditor offerings.