Onboarding challenges can be overcome
Increased sanctions, tighter anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) controls, plus client demands for a quicker, better all-round service in the cloud and the move to shared service platforms present client onboarding challenges to banks. But there are also opportunities, said Karen Braithwaite, BNY Mellon’s global head of client service, treasury services.
“Onboarding is our first opportunity to get client trust and approval,” she said, during a presentation of the latest piece of Forrester research commissioned by the bank and its technology partner Pegasystems. The research found 88 per cent of 140 commercial and investment banks questioned mid-year believe onboarding can have an impact on the ongoing relationship with the client.
The research also reveals 52 per cent of respondents blamed the failure of an onboarding procedure on lack of co-ordination, with 45 per cent citing poor communication. Other factors that contribute towards drop-outs include a perceived lack of support, too many requests for data and repetition of them.
BNY Mellon is using Pegasystems to help it with these issues and to run tools such as the new query management function. This automatically sends questions to the correct person at the bank in order to ensure a fast response, said the bank’s executive vice-president, Jeffrey Kuhn. “This is already sitting on 9000 desktops at the bank and we want to integrate clients into the system next,” he said.
The survey revealed that 62 per cent of banks are now looking to a case management provider and customer relationship management systems to help them onboard clients.
