In today’s competitive environment, financial services firms are faced with the challenge of maximizing revenue, reducing attrition, and maintaining customer relationships. That means adopting a holistic approach when it comes to developing true customer-centricity, the cornerstone of client lifecycle management. I define client lifecycle management as:

On-boarding:

• Establishing new accounts, products, and services for new or existing clients
• Processing a mix of paper and electronic information, stored in file cabinets and disparate legacy systems
• Ensuring compliance with bank policies and procedures

Ongoing Relationship Management:

• Processing add/change/delete requests for authorized signers, products, and services
• Growing the relationship through ongoing, personalized communications

Migration:

• Moving clients from legacy systems to end-state, target systems
• Supporting data migration, new documentation, validation of existing users and services

Client lifecycle management is especially important for serving corporate and institutional clients. Using whatever terminology your institution prefers—transaction banking, wholesale banking or cash management services—corporate and institutional clients continue to generate significant fee-based revenue for financial services firms. As such, there continues to be intense competition to win customer loyalty, especially with the increasing number of acquisitions and mergers. For this reason, financial services institutions (FSIs) are building a strong case for developing an effective client lifecycle management program.

Technology is a key enabler for an effective client lifecycle management program. FSIs were an early adopter of business process management (BPM) technologies. For transaction banking, BPM was initially focused on managing customer service inquiries about late payments, missing statements, loan advances, and the like.

When implemented across the client lifecycle, business process management (BPM) provides an underlying technology platform for process automation and case management that supports business agility, collaboration, efficiency, and helps you to respond quickly to the needs of your clients and support staff. But FSIs are struggling to keep up with dramatic changes in the way employees and customers interact. These changes are a result of four evolving trends: Cloud, Mobile, Social and Apps.

Next generation BPM technology solves the problem of ever-changing client lifecycle management requirements. Achieving true customer-centricity isn’t a "set it and forget it" process. Retaining corporate customers (and their lucrative fee-based business), requires you to look beyond client onboarding as a one-time event and towards an integral, ongoing component within the client lifecycle management process.