Banking Client Onboarding for Success:
5 Pieces of Wisdom
Here’s the problem: you’re frustrating your clients.
It’s no wonder why clients leave during the onboarding process. They never know where they are in the process, they receive multiple phone calls from you asking to provide the same information over and over, and it takes far too long for them to start utilizing their products and services.
The inability to see where a client is in the onboarding process forces employees to collect the same information multiple times, and input that information into multiple systems. These challenges all manifest into the same detrimental consequence: clients jumping ship and abandoning the onboarding process.
A 2016 survey conducted by Signicat, “The battle to on-board: Why 40% of consumers abandon banking applications,” investigating consumers’ experiences applying for financial products with traditional banks revealed surprising results that speak for themselves.
Customers surveyed.
%
Consumers who have abandoned bank applications.
Abandonments due to length of time.
%
Customers that classify in-branch experience as dissatisfying.
Here’s what you can do…
1. Use automated business processes or workflows.
If you experience this, my advice is to empower your staff with automated business processes. One way to do this is with a case management system. Case management systems provide workflows that automatically perform or trigger tasks. The workflows even reach outside of your department into legal, marketing, fraud, etc.
Here are some features of a case management system:
- Personalize User Interfaces
- Easily Add Ad Hoc Tasks
- Track Communications
- Bookmark Specific Pages
- Characterize Documents Within the Process
2. Adopt Paper Signatures’ hip cousin, Electronic Signatures.
- Average hours to receive manual, paper signature.
- Average hours to complete electronic signature.
It's flexible for clients and businesses.
It's secure.
It's easy to manage.
Put our electronic signature partner, eSignLive, to the test.
3. Make onboarding a mobile process.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. People are on their phones all day, so why not bring banking client onboarding there?
Your solutions should be compatible with phone and tablet screen sizes. This makes it so supervisors can react to key performance indicators, sales teams can get alerts for approved transactions and exceptions holding up processes, and users can execute face-to-face digital signings on a mobile device.
For tasks that are better on a larger viewing area such as uploading documents, updating and reviewing onboarding statuses, performing e-signatures, and reacting to ETCs and SLAs, users can leverage their tablet.
So when a manager walks from one meeting to the next, she can view transactions that are in danger of being late, prioritize them, and send them to staff members to work on all before she walks through the door of her next meeting.
Imagine fixing a problem before it becomes one.
See how Union Bank reduced onboarding times by adding mobile capabilities.
4. Use data to gain visibility and take action.
RELATIONSHIP MANAGERS
Straightforward visual dashboards make this challenge a little easier. RMs can see individual estimate to complete dates of onboarding clients and tasks to keep the client informed. Additionally, dashboards provide complete visibility into any exceptions, so you can proactively work with clients to resolve them.
SUPERVISORS
Because your focus is on onboarding pipelines and SLAs, you want a solution that breaks down your view into the business items you care about: estimate to complete, bottlenecks, workloads, campaigns, items not in good order, etc. A comprehensive view of these metrics will help you manage your teams effectively despite daily changing priorities.
DEPARTMENTAL DIRECTORS
Does my organization need some business process re-engineering?
How well-oiled is my machine?
Do we have recurring exceptions?
How are my teams performing?
How did that last campaign work out?
5. Get your head in the clouds.
The “cloud” is simply a method to deploy a software solution. The traditional method is on-premise: an organization owns the hardware and software and maintains the system in-house.
When an organization utilizes the cloud, it essentially “rents” secure space from a cloud provider. There are three ways to deploy a solution on the cloud.
- Public: Sign in to the solution with a user ID and password. Microsoft 365 is an example of a public cloud solution.
- Private: A hosting provider sets up your hosting servers and only your organization can touch them so there’s no co-mingling.
- Hybrid: Basically whatever you make it. For example, an organization might store documents on-premise but their workflows are in the cloud.
Why are financial institutions moving to the cloud?
- It’s easy to deploy
- It removes administrative tasks that handicap onboarding
- It frees you to focus on activities that will help your business sell and grow
Learn more at the links below.