Top Onboarding Mistakes To Avoid When Opening New Customer Accounts

The onboarding process for financial institutions is two fold–attracting: the right customers and complying with know your customer (KYC) rules.

Attracting the wrong kinds of customers costs your company more than you might suspect. Often enough, a dodgy churn rate can be traced back to a marketing misfire–when customers are attracted using the wrong incentives, they are more likely to bolt when another business presents them with a better incentive.

Compliance is equally important as the consequences for non-compliance can prove disastrous for many businesses. Besides the immediate threat of a steep fine or imprisonment, your business’s reputation can be irreparably damaged when money laundering or funding illicit activities occur under your brand.

Complicating ID Collection and Verification

KYC and anti-money-laundering (AML) processes can prove to be both long and tedious for customers looking to open accounts or perform transactions through your organization as soon as possible.

In many cases, financial businesses take too long to perform proper risk assessments on their customers and must request additional action and information from them multiple times before their accounts can be completed. This can be difficult for customers to deal with leading to 40% of customers abandoning the process.  

A few ways that KYC and AML can be simplified include:

• Cutting down on paperwork by going digital- Customer accounts can be opened much more quickly using digital forms and automated field filling.
• Go mobile to make transactions easier- By making it possible for customers to submit information from wherever they are, you can better accommodate their needs and reduce your team’s direct workload simultaneously.
• Make the process easier to understand- An onboarding process presented to users in clear steps they can easily follow is a great way to keep them engaged in seeing it through to the end.

Failing to Offer Digital Onboarding

Digital onboarding has grown from being merely a “nice-to-have” feature to being essential for customers among the millennial generation. Millennials expect to have access to digital-first options when creating a new account with an organization. In fact, 50% of them insist they would rather open their accounts digitally than in person.

By leveraging digital channels during the onboarding process, financial institutions can improve the following:

• Onboarding speed- Getting customers onboarded in less time makes them less likely to go looking for competitors or give up trying to complete the process.
• Onboarding security- Securing both your business and your customers by digitally safeguarding the sensitive information they need to submit throughout the onboarding process keeps avoidable human errors from happening in the first place.
• Customer retention- A quick and safe onboarding process sets your customers’ expectations up on the right track from the start of your relationship with them.

Paper Pushing

Companies no longer need to push piles of paperwork to accommodate important regulations such as KYC. Instead, information can be captured and stored digitally, benefitting both customers and financial institutions at once.

Both eForms and eSignatures can be used to curb the traditional tide of paperwork and simplify your onboarding protocol. eForms can help your team members and your customers collaboratively complete necessary forms in real-time. The potential for mistakes and omissions is drastically reduced through their use as well, further accelerating the process.

With eSignatures, financial institutions can now close more deals with customers without subjecting them to a multi-pronged legal acknowledgment process or otherwise slowing things down with in-person signing requirements. An eSignature can be requested of a customer located virtually anywhere and it can be completed from their mobile phone by clicking a simple link and signing as needed.

Make Compliance Easy with Software

The right first step is critical, especially when it comes to KYC processes. Intellicheck can verify an ID with 99.9% accuracy versus the industry average of 60% or less. Intellicheck’s high accuracy means that you can start out a relationship knowing that you can trust the person you are working with. Intellicheck also delivers the best experience by providing you with certainty that an ID is real in fewer steps (one v two or three with other solutions) and faster results (less than a second versus 10+ with other solutions).

Intuitive applications such as Intellicheck’s easily integrated solution give customers confidence in being able to quickly complete the onboarding process. By facilitating sensitive data submission through its secured platform, businesses can easily scan information on official identity documents and populate forms automatically.

We offer a solution that you can turn on and use, and an API solution that can tightly integrate with your systems and processes. We work with 5 out of the top financial institutions and credit card issuers as well as thousands of other businesses. Contact us to see how we can help you.