Manual, cumbersome and drawn-out client onboarding processes require multiple communications with the customer to collect and verify different identity documents.
The result? A poor client experience, leading to dissatisfied customers and a high attrition rate, resulting in lost revenue and the waste of expensive resource.
As a first interaction with your brand, this is not a great start to the relationship.
Client onboarding can be very demanding on valuable resources. In fact, the number of people working in compliance as a function is growing year by year, and the costs are spiralling. For example, following the fine of $1.9 billion applied to HSBC in 2012 – for failure to prevent money laundering by Latin American drug cartels and facilitating trading with sanctioned countries (source) – they tried to improve their compliance processes and ended up employing an additional 5,000 new staff members to spot suspicious activity.
In this new digital environment, clients expect a seamless onboarding journey and their patience for the time-consuming nature of traditional onboarding processes is fading fast, giving clear danger signs to firms who are not moving their processes forward.
Developers and product managers delving into their client’s needs
Many companies are now delving into their client’s needs and implementing customer onboarding solutions that involve leveraging tools like NorthRow’s to automate the collection and verification of the client’s identity quickly.
Today’s developers play an integral role in customer onboarding automation. Indeed, it is the responsibility of the developers to turn customer onboarding automation from a mere concept into a working reality that actually enhances the client experience.
Restricted by regulatory compliance
In the past, developers may have been hesitant to introduce automation into the client onboarding journey, as it is so closely tied with compliance processes, such as anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC) and customer due diligence (CDD), where regulation is often both confusing and constantly changing.
As a developer, who lives and breathes code, this may seem quite a tiresome project, especially if you work in heavily regulated industries like, payments, property, financial services or wealth management, where you need to access multiple services. However, this post attempts to address those constraints and equip developers with a better understanding of customer onboarding automation.
Audit your existing processes
Before you start automating, it is best practice to undertake a full audit of your existing client onboarding processes and ask yourself some questions, for instance:
- What data partners do you currently use for your client identity verification?
- What documents do you request from your clients?
- What regulations are you required to fulfil?
- How long does it take, on average, to fully onboard your clients?
Once you have found the answers and identified the issues, you can then work out where you can simplify matters and optimise client onboarding via automation.
It is best that you incrementally automate your processes, to ensure you create as little disruption as possible.
Place fewer touch-points on your client via APIs
Creating fewer client touch-points is the goal for successful client onboarding and here are 3 key questions the developers need to ask themselves:
- How quickly can you accurately obtain client information, before they can start using your product/service?
- How fast can you accurately meet your compliance requirements and fulfil robust client due diligence checks?
- How can you easily consolidate all client due diligence checks into a central repository?
The quickest way to find the answers to all 3 of these questions is via Application Programming Interfaces or APIs.
Why APIs are the way forward?
The amount of data available for business consumption is immense, the multiple types and the sheer volume of data available are very challenging for business operations. Data is stored in many silos, both in structured and unstructured forms. Accessing and harnessing that data is an ever-growing challenge for businesses globally. So how do you organise multiple streams of data originating from numerous sources in a coherent and insightful manner?
In the era of big data, using Application Programming Interfaces or APIs are the only solution to harness data from multiple sources and in multiple formats.
What is an API? An API allows two applications to communicate with one another. In other words, an API is a messenger that delivers your request to a provider and then delivers a response back to you. APIs work in the background by acquiring multiple siloed data sources (via databases, CRM, platforms, devices, websites and other APIs) and then connecting this data together to create value for the end-user.
Connect one API for access to multiple APIs
Connecting one API is manageable, but connecting hundreds of APIs accurately and securely creates its own set of problems. For each API, a developer needs to consider the technical issues, contractual agreements and compliance factors relevant to that API. A more efficient alternative is connecting to one API that can access multiple APIs or data sources, libraries and services.
This means that developers only need to integrate one API into their client onboarding workflow, removing the complexity of integrating multiple API services, which can get very expensive and confusing, and reducing the effort for development teams, whilst ensuring security, availability and ability to scale.
NorthRow’s single API solution
NorthRow’s single API provides secure access to over 200 high-quality global data sources. Our clients no longer need to sign multiple contracts and build multiple APIs with multiple parties; instead, NorthRow’s API lets our clients use a single contract and API to securely access data from multiple data partners.
NorthRow’s single API solution helps clients to make sense of multiple data streams, to better protect them against compliance failures and defend brand reputation, whilst at the same time delivering operational efficiency.
