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4 Customer Onboarding And Data Considerations

If Covid-19 has brought us anything, it is the ability to access many products and services almost instantaneously, with the huge drive towards digitalisation across all industries. In the wake of the pandemic, making the onboarding experience as appealing and effective as possible is proving to be a key competitive advantage.

Financial institutions have long declared their intention to get closer to their customers, but underinvestment in strategic opportunities and lack of understanding of its importance remains a longstanding problem. FinTech’s are putting mounting pressure on financial institutions by providing a seamless experience and therefore forcing financial institutions to reassess their process.

Considerations for a smarter Customer onboarding approach

When onboarding a new customer, there are a number of considerations you must think about.  Below, we take a look at what these are to ensure seamless onboarding.

1. Improve the quality of the data fed into your system

Often, the variety of documents required and multiple departments involved in the process can make client onboarding very complex and time-consuming. Unstructured datasets from various sources lead to data being insufficient in both quality and quantity and make process automation more difficult. As a result of that, customers are left frustrated as they do not know why they need to provide the same information multiple times. 

Finding a unified system to feed customer data with a standard approach helps organisations to provide a better customer experience, as well as the ability for better data analysis. Our all in one financial crime compliance tool FCGuard can help do that. It has been built with the latest technology and end user considerations to make it easy and efficient to navigate. The ability to maintain a full audit allows you to track all data flows and user actions across the board.

2. Understand your customer (and protect their privacy)

As consumers increasingly adopt digital technology, the data they generate creates both an opportunity to improve consumer engagement as well as a responsibility to keep consumer data safe. These insights help to develop new products and services, resulting in a comprehensive view of the end-to-end journey, which helps to identify gaps and opportunities. But protecting their data is as crucially important, otherwise it can result in reputational damage and a lack of trust in the future.

3. Be ready to adapt

Regulations and technologies change on a monthly or sometimes even on a weekly basis. It can be tricky to keep systems updated to comply with the changes, whilst avoiding impacting the customer’s experience. Therefore, it is important to have a light, comprehensive and flexible process which allows changes, impact assessments and adaptation to happen as quickly and safely as possible. FCGuard incorporates a new generation learning model for screening sanctions, PEP and adverse media. With this solution, you will be confident knowing you are fully sanction compliant, whole screening both in real time and batch. 

4. Keep up with new technologies

As many banks and financial institutions are still using legacy systems, providing customers with an end-to-end digital experience remains a challenge. Mobile identity verification technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly becoming the top 2 technologies to keep an eye on, as it helps to feed uniform data from customers by simply uploading a photo of their identity document along with a “selfie”.  AI automates human decisions based on past behaviour, reducing the chance of manual errors. Low levels of process automation require repeated exchanges with customers to gather information, which leads to inefficiency and frustration.

Finally, remember that better data also helps to reduce false positives! 

Customer Screening tools rely greatly on good quality data input (as well as clear list and tuning activities) to be able to generate exact matches. Small errors from a manual onboarding process such as misspellings or missing data can impact the tools’ ability of generating a good match and, therefore, increase the number of unnecessary hits as well as delaying the customer onboarding process.

At Contineo FRS, we have a team of highly skilled analysts who can help ease your onboarding process for you, while increasing efficiency. Our team will be happy to give you a free consultation or demo on our Customer Onboarding services and our latest financial crime compliance product, FCGuard. Simply email [email protected] to book an appointment today. 

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