We feel your need for client onboarding speed

These days, a typical weekend evening might look like this: Deciding against Saturday night spaghetti for the 3rd week in a row, we open an app able to put dinner on your front doorstep within an hour. After your Kung Pao Shrimp (mildly spicy) and fortune cookie (lucky numbers 11, 4, 22), you settle in as your smart TV offers up more entertainment than you could watch in a lifetime, all downloaded for viewing, not in minutes, but split-seconds. While watching, you decide to do some shopping, opting for free next day delivery, of course. And if any step along the way is delayed for any reason, somebody is going to hear about it.

Service expectations in our personal lives have become increasingly demanding, to say the least. The same can be said for client expectations in the financial services industry. Fortunately, with every change comes opportunity.

Exceeding expectations to prevent attrition

COVID-19 is the catalyst for much disruption: bank branch closures, employees working from home, and legacy business practices slowing down processes. According to a pre-pandemic survey conducted by Foresight Research of 11,000 banking customers, 12% of respondents said they planned to choose a new bank or credit union within the next two years.

After the pandemic hit, a follow-up survey painted a worse picture: 22 percent of banking customers reported being “extremely or very likely” to switch their primary financial institution in 12 to 24 months. Looking specifically at the 5,600 Gen Z and Millennials who took the survey, 27% of Gen Z and 38% of Millennials planned to change their bank or credit union in the next two years.

According to a Fintech Times and Chartis survey, 78 percent of banks surveyed said they had lost business from digital-first customers. Sidhartha Dash, research director of Chartis Research, says:

Clients are demanding a frictionless, transparent and rapid onboarding experience, which they can easily find at challenger banks. It’s time for traditional banks to up their game or risk losing out.

When faced with numbers like these, financial institutions are forced to prioritize digital transformation to mitigate churn and attract new clients. Digital client onboarding is one of the easiest ways to create a client experience that meets (or beats) expectations from the get-go.

The reward for agility (and how to deliver it)

Clients expect a “consumer-like” response from providers—friction-free in which digital and automated processes replace physical and human-intensive ones. They want to see value as fast as possible. Enabling digital client onboarding is one of the best ways to do just that.

When building a digital client onboarding experience, it’s important to think about where the current process gets stuck. It might be the way the client transmits account documents or how client data is authenticated and validated. In almost every case, document processing is the main bottleneck.  

At Alkymi, we help our financial services companies build frictionless customer experiences, for example creating new accounts in a fraction of the time.

Digital client onboarding designed for financial services, by those who know financial services

When it comes to customer onboarding, customers tell us that they need data accuracy, risk reduction, operational efficiency, and real-time data transformation. Alkymi’s platform easily handles emails and documents (like account statements)—where other automation solutions typically get stuck.

The first step to enabling digital client onboarding is eliminating as much of the manual work when onboarding a customer. With Alkymi, once a client submits their information, data extraction happens instantly. Emails, PDFs, and scanned images are transformed into process-ready data. An analyst merely has to review the new account information, and with two mouse clicks, send it off to be activated via any downstream operational system or automated workflow.

Alkymi customer, TIAA, described the benefits of digital onboarding this way:

Today, that process is very human-intensive, time-consuming, and sometimes error-prone. We’re working with Alkymi to automate this process and make it real-time. Users will upload their documents, and Alkymi will process their documents in real-time, allowing the customers to validate their data and submit their documents. And with no human intervention, the rollover process will be complete.

When you accelerate the onboarding experience, clients can access their accounts right away and see value almost instantly. It also means your employees are free to provide advice and expertise instead of a status check on paperwork. With these improvements, you can take a major step in your digital transformation journey and set the stage for further automation.

Discover how Alkymi can help you deliver digital onboarding to your clients. Schedule a demo or learn about our digital client onboarding solution.