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One of the most common comments we hear from senior leaders of Client Onboarding, CLM or KYC functions in Financial Institutions, is that their Front-Office is frustrated with these processes.
Often, technology is held up as the solution to this problem, but in our experience, there are many underlying causes of their frustrations that are not related to technology and must be addressed before technology is brought into the conversation. In this blog, I look at the 5 common complaints from the Front-Office and the role policy, process, people, culture, data, and organisational design have to play in resolving these issues and delivering a better experience for the Front-Office, the end customer and Operations teams alike.
Common complaints
1. “The onboarding process is taking too long”
For many Front-Office teams, the onboarding process is too slow, often taking weeks or months to onboard new clients or new entities. Often, when progress updates are requested, there is the added frustration that little progress has been made.
Underlying causes can include:
2. “Why are we asking our client to provide that?”
Another common complaint from the Front-Office is that the Onboarding, KYC or Financial Crime Compliance teams are asking for information from the client that they feel is unreasonable. This could be information about the shareholders, directors, nature of business, or more. This has the potential to damage client relationships or worse, cause a loss of business, as well as strain internal relationships.
3. “We haven’t got any capacity to work on that”
A constant characteristic within most onboarding and KYC functions is that the teams have a full workload, lack capacity, and have a large backlog of cases. This leads to frustration in the Front-Office when existing cases are moving slowly and there are new clients that they want to onboard.
In addition to the points already discussed above, underlying causes can include:
4. “Where is this case in the process?”
Given the sometimes iterative nature of KYC, multiple components within the process and multiple people contributing to any one case, a seemingly simple answer can be very difficult to obtain or have confidence in its accuracy.
5. “We’ll need to go away and look into that”
One of the most common areas of frustration across this process occurs when a seemingly simple question is asked (for example, about client accounts, client risk, the client population or a client’s KYC status) but it requires detailed analysis to be conducted which can take days or even weeks – often returning with multiple ‘versions of the truth.’
Do these complaints sound familiar? If you are struggling with any of these issues, you are certainly not alone. We work with our clients to resolve such issues and other common challenges within the Client Onboarding, CLM and KYC space. Get in touch if you would like to discuss your challenge and how we can help.
This content is provided by an external author without editing by Finextra. It expresses the views and opinions of the author.
Sireesh Patnaik Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) at Pennant Technologies
02 October
Jelle Van Schaick Head of Marketing at Intergiro
01 October
Ruchi Rathor Founder at Payomatix Technologies
30 September
Fiaz Sindhu Head of Community Banking at FIS
27 September
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