Digital by design: advancing the client onboarding process
There’s a fundamental tension balancing two opposing but ultimately aligned forces shaping the development of today’s financial service products.
On one side, financial service providers are driven by commendable intentions to enhance clients’ lives. On the other, financial service regulators exert understandable efforts to uphold market integrity.
Are these two positions reconcilable? We certainly believe so.
There must be ultimate alignment. Both parties want to do the right thing, which is ensuring the best outcome for the whole industry.
Integrated software application providers like Puritas can help achieve this. Our role is creating solutions that fund administration and fund management clients can use to reduce, if not remove, the tension.
One important aspect is advancing the client onboarding process.
Onboarding issues and opportunities
Repeating well-known challenges involved in manually onboarding new clients serves little purpose at this point. Few in the finance industry won’t already understand the vexing processes involved.
However, the impact of onboarding inefficiencies and limitations is worth underlining.
Estimates of how much it costs to collect, check and process physical forms and documents vary from report to report, but all agree there’s significant expense involved. Which will rise as regulatory expectations increase.
Then consider the cost of losing potential new clients who drop out of the onboarding process. Perhaps intentionally through frustration with time taken and steps involved. Or unintentionally as their interest drifts elsewhere. Either way, it represents a missed opportunity, and wasted effort.
What’s the response? Three choices come to mind.
Ignoring the problem clearly makes no sense − the costs and losses remain. Fighting the system might feel good but ultimately results in losers all round.
The obvious − though not always pursued − best direction of travel is looking for improvements in the onboarding process. Seize the opportunity to make things better – for companies, clients and regulators.
Digital by design
We’re living in a time when outlooks are changing − people expect better ways of transacting with suppliers. It’s partly a Covid-19 legacy, more a technology thing, mostly just progression.
Puritas prides itself as being ahead of the curve in this area through adopting digital by design.
Our PureClient solution was specifically developed through first hand awareness of challenges involved in onboarding and expert understanding of technology’s potential to overcome them. Mix in a dogged determination to improve each process step and we think the outcome speaks for itself.
PureClient starts by capturing initial expressions of interest and then drawing potential clients to a branded onboarding portal.
Progressing opportunities is made easier through integration with advanced digital identity applications that check and assure client identity. This creates a simplified, client-controlled application experience – no need to collect and verify physical documents such as passports or utility bills.
Collecting client data is straightforward thanks to Puritas’s use of digital data capture technology including fillable PDFs, online forms and web-based interfaces. From these, it’s possible to automatically complete the entire client setup without time-consuming manual data entry processes, which may be prone to errors. Moreover, the same technology can also instigate client investment selections.
The PureClient solution also makes managing risk easier through automated risk assessments and access to industry leading external service providers using API integrations.
Finally, our onboarding applications automatically set-up value-added features such as client portals and real time online reporting.
Aiming for alignment
In summary, tension is not necessarily unhealthy. It can help sharpen minds and encourage innovation towards achieving ultimate alignment. Just look at the range and complexity of financial services products to see evidence of this.
However, our message is to not overlook essential processes such as onboarding. The industry’s aim should be digital by design – it’s ultimately what service providers need, what their clients expect and what regulators will welcome.
Puritas always welcomes discussion on the challenges associated with onboarding clients, and opportunities to improve the experience of everyone involved. If you are interested in this area, email paul.madden@puritas.co.uk , call us at +44 (0) 1534 874 100 or
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