Managing the customer experience is a high priority for banks and financial services firms

Consistent provision of excellent customer experience is rewarded with high levels of customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy, all of which return value to the bottom line.

Because they unlock value, customer experience initiatives have the attention and backing of bank boards and executive teams, across the globe.

Winning new corporate clients spurs intense competition as banks race to take prospective customers off the market. Completing their onboarding process at great speed, while minimizing outreach to prospective clients, with requests for information and documents is critical to success.

Digital platforms, variously referred to as customer lifecycle management and workflow management, allow banks to digitize business processes they use to interact with customers. Integrating these digital platforms with internal information systems informs customer-facing staff, equipping them to deliver an excellent experience with every interaction.

To be competitive, executives responsible for customer experience initiatives would prefer that customer onboarding is managed as a digital process. Onboarding new customers is complicated for banks by their obligation to undertake due diligence to comply with anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism funding (CTF) regulations.

Bank’s technical teams draw on their deep expertise in their firm’s internal information systems as they implement a customer lifecycle management platform. The work of KYC due diligence is unlike other workflows within the onboarding process in that it relies on information from external suppliers. A large international bank may have supply agreements with as many as one hundred information partners including state and national registries, regulators, lists of sanctioned countries, companies and individuals, and third-party providers of information about corporations, their shareholders, and their beneficial owners.

Few banks can sustain a business case to invest in the development resources required to build and maintain integrations with large numbers of external information sources. For this reason, KYC due diligence often remains a manual process, beyond the scope of digital customer experience initiatives and disconnected from customer lifecycle management.

Such a situation is problematic. Because operating KYC manually is inefficient and error-prone, it delays onboarding and undermines customer experience initiatives.

Banks can solve this problem by integrating KYC automation with their customer lifecycle management platform to automate the entire onboarding process. Enabling information to flow freely through the digital onboarding process and for banks to achieve their customer experience objectives.

As observed by the Head of Digital Transformation at one global bank which has taken this route,

We’ve got our cycle time down from a mean of 12 days to two days. 80% of the effort in onboarding is removed instantly.

To learn more about how KYC automation supports customer experience initiatives and accelerates return on investment from customer lifecycle management projects, download our whitepaper.