As promised in our previous post on client onboarding, this second one will enlighten how the onboarding process can turn into a revenue function.

Today’s digital technology is a strategic asset to help create an efficient client experience. So, what are the technologies needed for banks, brokerages, and wealth firms to support an appropriate client onboarding process?

A workflow-driven platform integrating the onboarding-involved systems and applications

The technologies involved in this process span from big data and analytics, CRM, document management, workflow and collaboration tools, wealth management platforms and third-party engines.

Furthermore, multiple lines of business (e.g. retail brokerage, private banking, institutional business) are involved, requiring custom questionnaires, business rules, and forms.

A number of critical technology areas should be the focus for firms when choosing appropriate systems to support the client onboarding process:

In summary, technology should be able to automate customer interaction capture, verification and authentication, decisioning, enable cross-selling, and finally account opening.

CRM at the core and centre of client onboarding

Having these technologies in place brings improvement of the onboading client experience, reduction of cycle time, stronger control and operational excellence.

Even if every firm approaches the client onboarding process in a different way, nevertheless, this phase has impacts on the client, the advisor, and the firm no matter which business model it has or which segment of customers is it serving.

CRM systems can be considered the alpha and omega for this process. With this single point of data collection, the quality of service significantly increases. Moreover, the trend of expanding CRM capabilities to improve the client onboarding experience has led to a number of approaches firms have followed concerning CRM integration to existing business platforms.

In some cases, the CRM system is embedded into an existing wealth management platform. This can limit the dynamicity of today’s external CRM systems.

In other cases, there is a separate module for vertical business CRM, based on existing CRM technology (e.g. Microsoft’s or other), which can be integrated via a middleware into the firm’s wealth management platform of choice, loosely coupled with other systems at the firm and creating the client account at the back office.

This technology approach favors today’s focus on targeting multiple client segments at various touch points. Also, firms are able to build incremental capabilities to sustain the changing regulatory requirements. Carefully mapping data to these systems will be key to providing a successful client onboarding experience.