While COVID-19 may have pushed financial service organizations to digitalize, these companies have no plans of stopping even after COVID’s effects lessen. In fact, 77% of traditional financial institutions plan to increase their focus on digital transformation to improve customer experience. 

But there’s one critical stage of the customer journey that businesses must improve if they want to be successful: client onboarding.

Challenges with Client Onboarding in Financial Services 

When customers are onboarded successfully, they have a significantly higher customer satisfaction score in comparison to those who don’t, according to a study done by J.D Power. 

But while onboarding can be done online, it still can take an average of 32 days and require 8 different interactions.

In fact, 52% of wealth management firms worry that they’ll lose their clients during onboarding, which can take up to 4 weeks.  

Onboarding is painful and costly across the entire industry as shown here: 

• It takes 7 days to onboard retail customers and 90-120 days to onboard corporate banking customers
• There is a $40 million average spend to onboard new clients 
• 63% of consumers in Europe abandoned a digital application due to poor onboarding 
• 12% of corporate customers switched banks as a result of poor onboarding 

But onboarding can be a critical driver of customer satisfaction and retention if done right.

In order to build lasting relationships with customers, financial services organizations need to ensure that onboarding is smooth and personalized, so customers will desire to remain a customer. 

How to Improve Onboarding Financial Services Clients

Financial organizations can leverage these 3 digital transformation features to enhance onboarding: 

1. Self-Service 

   Empower customers to sign up and complete the entire or majority of the onboarding process without needing to contact or check in with an agent.

   In fact, 79% of customers now expect organizations to provide some level of self-service functionality, and this is predicted to increase as we move into a post-COVID world.

   Use self-service not only to satisfy customers, but also to reduce internal resources and costs. 
    

2. Automation and Workflows 

   Onboarding is a complicated process, not only involving multiple departments, but also requiring compliance with changing regulations such as Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML). 

   These steps often are what cause bottlenecks during onboarding, resulting in a disjointed and lengthy process. 

   
   By setting up workflows, financial service organizations can break down the barriers to a smooth onboarding and accelerate the entire process. When the necessary systems and regulatory processes are connected, the customer won’t realize the different actions being taken on the backend and only see a seamless experience.
    

3. Personalization 

   Speed isn’t the only component to success. Onboarding is also where financial organizations can and should make a good first impression to their new customers. 

   Banks can leverage personalization to offer guidance and tailored content during the onboarding process. This can help set up long-lasting relationships as clients feel their banks care and value their financial performance. 

   And customers are not hesitant to switch if they aren’t given the tailored guidance they want. Wise leaders will get ahead of this and retain the customers they worked so hard to earn.

   But the benefits of personalization also extends beyond new customers onboarding to recommend new services to existing customers. Leveraging existing information, financial services organizations can reach and onboard customers to new products and services they might not have known about before. 

Decreasing Abandonment with Better Onboarding 

As one of the first steps in the customer journey, onboarding is critical to financial service success. Ensure that customers are able to get started quickly and painlessly, so that they’ll want to start a long-lasting relationship with your business. 

Make Customer Experience a Differentiator for Your Business 

Onboarding is only the first step in the customer journey. Learn how to further your customer experience with this whitepaper >