Customer Pain Points

Opening a new account should actually be a quick and a painless experience.
A lengthy, inefficient account opening procedure often frustrates customers and results in high abandonment and attrition rates.

An Analogy

Before we deep dive as to what is “Client OnBoarding“, let’s try to correlate to a similar analogy for EoB or Employee OnBoarding in our day to day life.

Whenever we join a firm, the first day of the induction is occupied with the collection of certificates and documents, signatures, agreements, a bank account and finally the generation of the Employee ID, and mapping it as a part of company payroll. Once done, the person is considered to have been on-boarded to the system.
Now, this entire sequence of steps of verification of documents, background check, opening bank account and generation of an ID can be considered as a reusable process across the organization based on company standards.
So, rather than recreating the EoB process for each vertical, we can actually have a generic system at the top level and the different verticals can leverage this by just making service calls to the exposed service.

Similar is the situation with the CoB process or framework.

What is a CoB?

• The Client OnBoarding Framework basically refers to the reusable framework within an enterprise, that can deal with account opening, KYC (Know Your Customer), onboarding formalities, document management and many more.
• This framework can either directly fit-in with the existing Enterprise Application (along with the front-end UI) or can be exposed as a service so that it can be accessed via web-services and SOAP calls.
• The Onboarding Team are the first point of contact for new clients joining the system. There are usually Entitlements Team who take care of the OnBoarding process.

Why CoB?

• To provide high-quality user experiences uniformly across all channels
• To enhance product selection and cross-sell capabilities across all channels to help customers identify products that are right for them
• To minimize application processing times and streamline the information collection process
• To reduce reliance on paper
• To increase business agility
• To accelerate time to market

And, to coin a new Acronym “SECT” (self explainatory)

• S – Simplicity
• E – Efficiency
• C – Consistency
• T – Transparency

The basic steps for a CoB Methodology

The CoB implementation, though automated, is a step of procedures and prerequisites that have to be followed to reap the best benefits out of the framework.

• Analysis of the scope of work, business domain and CoB fit tradeoff, and ROI
• Defining Requirements – by scanning through the integration touch points
• Data Modelling from a reusability standpoint
• Preparing People and Process
• Performance Standard Benchmarking
• Implementation and Execution
• Review – to ensure efficiency and adherence to client’s requirements

Variants and Flavors of CoB

• As no two business processess are same, the same holds good for the CoB framework too.
• If we have a Client onboarding process for Corporate Banking, it may not do justice or hold a promise for Retail Banking customers.
• One BPM vendor has a base/generic foundation framework for Account Opening or Client onBoarding called “New Business Backbone FS – NBBFS“, but for Retail Banking specific clients, the solution is “Retail Account Opening” which just a Retail flavor or customized version of NBBFS

Business Benefits of CoB

• Increased volume of new account applications
• Improved account opening rates, retention rates for new customers & reduction of the Attrition Rates of the Customers
• Reduced time to complete online applications
• Cut short the time to open an account
• Rapid Deployment and Speedy Roll-outs
• Increased Client Satisfaction
• Reduced staff training time
• Reduced cost of new business
• Increase in ROI
• Reduced acquisition costs at enterprise level
• Common and Generic framework for the entire organization/domain
• Cross Selling

Some common Must-Haves for a CoB Solution

• An End-to-end process for full account opening management
• Multi-channel, multi-product customized processing
• Next step processing driven by business guidelines
• Library of products, APIs and components, documents, eligibility rules, pricing, and commission details
• Ensure that the right data is collected at the right time
• Support of paperless processing or pre-filling of application document forms eliminating entry of redundant data
• Know Your Customer – KYC processes that comply with internal and external policies
• Automated decision based business rules that are used as key risk assessment factors
• Seamless real-time integration with legacy systems and content management systems
• Robust audit trails and reports that track and monitor each step of the account opening process
• Exceptional Handling capability or intelligent way of throwing and catching the exception
• Dashboard and Reporting

Some of the Best Practices for successful CoB
(Reference from : http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/best_practices_customer_onboarding/q/id/47060/t/2 )

• Best Practice No. 1: Use ECM To Improve Transaction Management
• Best Practice No. 2: Move To Distributed Capture
• Best Practice No. 3: Have A Paper To E-Forms/RIA Strategy
• Best Practice No. 4: Move To “Client-Centric” Onboarding
• Best Practice No. 5: Use E-Signatures To Get Paper Out Of The Process

“Wrap and renew” reuse of existing assets such as pricing engines, scoring models, and fulfillment systems enable rapid deployment and leverage versus a lengthy and costly “rip and replace” approach

Products which provide CoB

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