Why First Impressions Are Everything In A Digital World

Transforming our wealth management client’s broker onboarding in less than 9 months.

Why first impressions are everything

Postal paperwork, in-person identification, lengthy approvals and ambiguity in the process – these are all the hallmarks of an outdated financial services’ onboarding process that must change to compete in this digital world.

Traditional players run the risk of losing customers before they’ve even become one by creating friction in this critical step to make a positive impression.

A 2020 survey of 4,000 European consumers revealed that two thirds of prospects abandoned their attempt to complete a financial application. On average, 50% said they’d abandon a process taking more than twenty minutes.

Onboarding is so important to some customers its even part of the consideration set. In a 2017 EY study, 30% of respondents chose ‘easier onboarding’ as their main reason for selecting a Fintech company.

Why First Impressions Are Everything in a Digital World | Axell-Hub

Reimagining digital onboarding for our client

Recently, we were engaged by a large European wealth manager to create digital client onboarding.

It’s a process that can be tackled in many different ways. For example, you could digitise client-facing forms, while leaving the internal process unchanged. This may be a simple fix, improving the customer experience, but it fails to address the underlying inefficient business processes.

Ultimately, the client had clear project goals that streamlined the process and allowed us to choose a technology provider, co-design the solution and implement the process in less than nine months.

The end result was a complete redesign of our client’s front and back-end onboarding processes. The solution delivers on the four project goals:

A new seamless and scalable process

By partnering with a FinTech, the client was able to move quickly from ideation to implementation. In fact, within 3 months, a new onboarding process was designed, and a Proof-of-Concept was up and running. Once the POC was approved by the business, a full detailed design took the solution from an MVP into full production within six months.

The result was a new onboarding experience that delivers on the four project goals:

  1. Client experience – the process was fully digitised, from e-forms on the customer’s end, to managing and storing data digitally for easy access.
  2. Process efficiency – The new process is now managed by an automated workflow tool, saving many man hours of manual work.
  3. Transparency – all information is available to the right people in the business allowing for accurate reporting and up-to-date information.
  4. Risk reduction – Automatic and accurate reports can be created and sent to regulators and management.

Finally, the platform has also given the client a scalable base to digitise other processes throughout the business.

Read more on the project in our use case.

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