(25 July 2022 – United Kingdom) Financial services firms need to find a balance between a smooth onboarding experience for clients while complying with a growing list of rules, Len Williams reports for The Journal of the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI).
After spending time and money marketing to customers, no business wants to lose new leads because of a clunky sign-up process. But this happens more often than you might think.
Financial institutions know this is an issue but, while they want to onboard customers as quickly as possible, they also need to comply with an ever-expanding array of regulations. What’s more, the rules change from one country to the next.
“Departments within banks often don’t talk to each other, which is an issue when customers need multiple services. The FX markets team may not necessarily communicate or integrate cleanly with the trade finance team, or transaction banking” commented East & Partners Global Head of Markets Analysis, Martin Smith.
“Opening accounts in a second country can also be a challenge. If a company does its banking with a global bank in its home market, the company might reasonably assume it could quite quickly open another account with the global bank in another country. But this is rarely the case, and the company would normally have to go through the full onboarding process again. That's probably the biggest frustration because in quite a lot of instances customers feel like the service provider should already know them and have all their information.”
“This leaves clients frustrated because they often feel they’re having to talk to lots of different people at a single bank about the same issues” Smith added.
CISI members can read more featuring East & Partners “The future of client onboarding in financial services” Global Insight Report findings based on direct interviews with 737 large corporates across eight markets: https://ph.cisi.org/cisiweb2/cisi-news/the-review-article/the-onboarding-tightrope