Why Online Customer Onboarding is Both a Risk and an Opportunity

The banking industry is changing, but financial institutions are still catching up and some traditional inefficient ways of doing things still remain. Customer onboarding experiences depend on personal interactions with staff members who use heavily manual tasks that take up valuable time for both parties involved. That means customers still have to go to the physical locations, complete forms, submit IDs, etc. This can be inconvenient, and time-consuming for businesses, and customers, trying to take their banking online. Online customer onboarding has both risks and opportunities for financial institutions.

Risks

It is important to mention both the potential risks involved with online customer onboarding for financial institutions and the solutions. This section will explain those risks and opportunities and help you to see why IgniteConnex is the perfect solution to help your financial institution make the switch to an online onboarding process.

Opportunities

For financial institutions, the opportunities for doing online customer onboarding far outweigh the risks.

Efficiency

In any business, automated processes help to make the overall experience seamless and efficient. Such is the case with online customer onboarding for financial institutions. Having automated processes in place can make the process quicker compared to traditional methods that dealt with paper documents. First, there’s the process of having to print out the documentation for the customer, the process of obtaining appropriate signatures, and then the time it takes to manually store these documents. Automating your onboarding process makes everything easier, as everything is digitized, including the signature, and everything is stored in the cloud. That saves your company time and overhead costs (printing).

With that said, in-person onboarding can take hours or days to complete. In some cases, it can be a multi-tiered process requiring more than one trip to your financial institution. Some customers find themselves having to make multiple trips to the bank before they are officially onboarded, due to all the information the bank needs. In most cases, a customer can have an active account through the online onboarding process within 24 hours.

Increased Revenue

When you improve efficiency, you improve your customer service time overall. That allows for more customers to be serviced over time. More customers opening accounts in your bank means more revenue for your bank. Also, in-person onboarding can be more costly for the bank due to the inefficient and outdated process like paper form filing, scanning, gathering of info, documentation, etc., whereas online onboarding is not as time consuming, nor costly.

Customer Convenience

Most bank hours don’t work for the full-time worker or business. With online account opening, the service is automated and available for your customers around the clock. That means convenient banking that fits the client’s schedule.

Compliance

Onboarding is the essential welcoming process through which an individual becomes a bank customer. When the process is safe and convenient, it can help the financial institution meet its goals for growth and revenue. The onboarding process initially consists of two main components: Know Your Customer (KYC) and the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) framework.

Knowing your customer is part of the KYC framework. Not only is this the key to building relationships, but banks have to do their due diligence to identify and verify all customers. The screening process can be pretty thorough and is the reason why the onboarding process is so lengthy for some customers. Going through the appropriate channels to ensure no political or criminal risks are at play is not always easy or secure to do using an online process.

Financial institutions are not only concerned with terrorism but also drug and human trafficking, tax evasion, corruption, and smuggling. The bank’s due diligence helps protect the bank from fraudulent activities. IgniteConnex provides integrations to KYC and AML vendors as part of the seamless onboarding process, with the settings and rules defined by the Financial Institutions.

The Perfect Solution

Many financial institutions will say that the onboarding experience is the most crucial part of the business. Given that today’s consumers expect their bankers to know them, and understand them, it is easy to see why onboarding is so essential. Take away the one-on-one, face-to-face experience and you miss the opportunity to build an essential relationship with your customer. But what if there is a way to get that and stay compliant with an online customer boarding process? If you don’t choose the right vendor, a bad experience unsells your customer. So, it’s extremely important to choose the right vendor for your online customer onboarding needs, and that can be a challenge. That’s why you need to know about IgniteConnex.

Conclusion

IgniteConnex offers a streamlined, configurable process that is convenient for both customers and staff. It speeds up the account opening process for consumers and business accounts, allowing your institution to serve more customers in less time. Additionally, it integrates seamlessly with your existing systems and infrastructure, making it easy to implement and use. Staying compliant with online customer onboarding just got easier with IgniteConnex. Digital solutions offer a better experience for the customer and benefit the financial institution in multiple ways.

IgniteConnex is a leader in fraud protection and prevention for digital customer onboarding services. Click here to learn more.

Key Takeaways:

• Financial institutions are still catching up on digital trends and traditional and inefficient processes still remain.
• When you improve account opening efficiency, you improve your customer service time overall and enable for more customers to be serviced over time.
• In-person onboarding can be more costly for the bank due to the inefficient and outdated process like paper form filing, scanning, gathering of info, documentation, etc..
• IgniteConnex offers a streamlined, configurable process that is convenient for both customers and staff. It speeds up the account opening process for consumers and business accounts, allowing your institution to serve more customers in less time, and integrates with your legacy systems.