Let’s recall once again what’s going on within the wealth management industry.

The unprecedented rate of change that has been experienced had customer expectations evolving at an even faster pace and considering the demand for digital solutions is sky high, digital leaders’ market share is rapidly, sustainably growing.

Wealth managers are therefore already answering to those changes, that are now everyday arena, increasingly adopting digital first policies, working on a frictionless, fully digital client onboarding, turning their back to legacy technology and taking on an automation-driven and agile approach to business and processes. And this digital phenomenon – rather than transformation at this point – is not just happening on the outside, but also within organisations switching to paperless.

Although many live this reality to the fullest, others hesitate to offer full digital services end-to end and still run multiple crucial processes on a paper base. Client onboarding is just one of them, yet probably the most important – it’s the first date with your digitally mature customer, and if it goes wrong, well there’s no need to have another one. And efficiency problems are no less than the red flag. Failing to deliver a seamless customer experience across the journey causes customers to walk straight to another firm, offering a better service.

It’s not just a matter of real time services though, but rather leaving aside unnecessary costs and reducing operating ones for the firm, boosting efficiency and productivity.

Also, digital onboarding opens up to a broader client target who takes as read that account information, documents, and reports will be accessible online and via mobile devices. And expectations grow even greater considering that today customers can start their onboarding journey – whatever kind – anywhere (a homepage, an Instagram post etc.) and interrupt it at any time to then continue where they left off thanks to omnichannel solutions.

Additional reasons why are error minimisation, improved compliance and accelerated back-office processing, together with improved data integration – client data can be imported from CRMs and other systems thanks to paperless systems.

Eventually, all this may lead to reach the bigger goal of the bigger picture: to improve customer experience and retention.