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The account opening process historically has been a poor client experience that required manual client signatures, oftentimes not completed correctly. Both the financial services industry and its clients deserve better.
Thankfully, the onboarding process has evolved to become less paper-based and thereby increasing client satisfaction. Digital client onboarding creates a customer experience that is quite easy and more often completed compared to its paper-based alternative. The digital onboarding process brings operational efficiency to this work. A streamlined onboarding process is helping financial services professionals better add new clients and their accounts while also maintaining compliance.
Client onboarding can involve a lot of repetitive tasks to achieve the adequate data collection. That’s why financial planning professionals have been increasingly leaning toward automating workflows and automated tools to ensure compliance requirements are met and client financial information is properly gathered and stored. Technology that has built in compliance checks makes a world of difference to both clients and financial advisors in creating a satisfactory onboarding experience.
Creating a Robust Financial Advisor Client Onboarding Checklist
What does it take to seamlessly get clients to input their data and have it verified and executed quickly? An onboarding checklist is quite helpful to follow.
The client onboarding checklist should include:
- What information financial advisors need to obtain from clients and when the data needs to be collected
- How that information will be securely and properly stored (which CRM system will be utilized)
- What forms need to be filled out (hopefully digitally)
- A list of each of the steps financial advisors will need to help the firm complete to ensure all client accounts are onboarded
Given all the moving parts that are involved in wealth managers’ client onboarding, it’s easy to see why financial firms would want to outsource this to trusted third party systems or utilized technology to enable onboarding efficiency and business growth.
The Client Onboarding Process Issues
One of the key issues in customer onboarding is that the process can be very stop-and-go if customer data is incorrect or not filled in or clients can get frustrated with some portion of the onboarding process. A complex and cumbersome onboarding process can either delay new account openings or outright make a client quit the process and stay where they are out of ease and convenience.
Providing a good client experience is during the onboarding process is paramount as this is a client’s first impression of a new financial services firm. Client satisfaction starts at this point and wealth managers will need to continue to meet client expectations from onboarding onward. Thus an effective onboarding strategy sets the professional relationship off to a strong start.
How OnBord Solves These Problems
OnBord significantly minimizes that by harnessing the tech we all have right at our disposal and respond to quickly — our electronic devices. Utilizing SMS messages, OnBord puts client onboarding in the customers’ hands, which makes this digital onboarding process seamless. More clients input their own data and then, if there comes a point where a client stops entering their data from the financial institutions they participate with, OnBord sends the client a gentle reminder to keep going with filling out the client’s profile. This is beneficial for all parties involved.
And throughout the client onboarding, all data is kept secure while being efficiently utilized.
The onboarding process is going to increasingly become digitized to automate routine tasks and maximize efficiency.
Ready to transform your client onboarding experience? Schedule a demo today to see how OnBord streamlines the process while maintaining compliance standards.
