Before the advent of digitalisation, the process of obtaining a loan was extremely tedious and time-consuming, causing long wait times for approvals and a negative client experience.
But things have changed. Digitalisation has transformed financial services. Today, lenders are using the latest digital banking solutions to rationalise customer data, gain a holistic view over their clients, and target and deliver their products more efficiently than ever before.
But how can financial institutions use digital technology to go beyond improvements in onboarding and take a lifetime view of their clients?
The use of a cloud-based core banking platform to collate data gathered across the client lifecycle leads to greater efficiency and employee productivity, helping you better manage client relationships, both from the head office and in the field.
Client-centric design
Getting the most out of your digital platform requires adapting into to the era of “customer-centricity”. To do so, organisations must do three things:
- deliver a 360º view of the customer across the product lifecycle
- fight fraud without compromising the customer experience
- break traditional business constraints to serve today’s non-traditional customer.
Core banking systems with client-centric management functions complement the physical client relationship by automating client “touch points”.
An efficient digital onboarding process reinforces your organisation’s client-centricity while taking care of critical operational risk mitigation procedures. This means making the process of opening an account seamless for clients and service providers.
Creating a 360-degree client view solves the problem of siloed or duplicate data – a side effect of organisations adding new channels that hold information separately without proper data integration.
A client dashboard consolidating every piece of information such as client profile, picture, signature, account information, documents, and reference checks in a centralised database improves user experience (UX) with intuitive navigation.
For clients, the system should involve them in a dialogue across branches and services with a streamlined digital experience, e.g., using a real-time client dashboard to follow up with clients and provide them with relevant, tailored information about their accounts. Connecting all the data dots yields a more complete and multi-dimensional client profile.
Getting the digital onboarding experience right
Too often, the onboarding process is limited to the very first interaction between a financial institution and its new client. This may involve little more than collecting personal and business information, or simply filling out a loan application.
The inadequacy – or even absence! – of “Know Your Customer” (KYC) standards can create serious client and counterparty risks for financial institutions, which can result in a significant financial impact on the business, and the need to divert considerable management time and effort towards resolving the problems that arise.
But clients expect convenience and quality of service delivery, and this limited interaction is no longer acceptable.
A cloud-based core banking system that offers a fully digital onboarding process allows financial institutions to both speed-up client onboarding and accelerate data remediation and enrichment to ensure compliance.
A robust technology solution that enables Client Due Diligence (CDD) can help financial institutions assess money laundering risks with better identification mechanisms – mitigating client-related risks can be the first step to achieving a streamlined onboarding experience.
It also avoids unnecessary re-routing to physical channels by dealing with clients within the web interface, mobile devices, or other channels.
Identifying clients on digital channels
Identifying potential clients can also be fully digitalised across channels.
With the ability to identify potential clients, your loan officers can record key customer information in the system during the earliest stages of contact to facilitate the onboarding of new clients, or even to trigger marketing campaigns combining the data collected from different sources into a single client profile.
Such enriched and up-to-date profiles give organisations a deeper understanding of the financial needs and habits of new and existing customers.
These details give organisations the option to tailor communications by delivering notifications directly from the system to clients, such as for loan approval, disbursement, deposit, withdrawal, repayment reminders before instalment due dates, birthday greetings, and so on.
Digital onboarding can also be an opportunity to help existing clients start using new products and services.
Institutions can use automated messaging triggered by an action to support revenue generation and marketing campaigns through upsell and cross-sell opportunities as clients move from prospect to purchaser.
Document management
Financial institutions have tried to reduce paper usage in recent years through digitalisation, yet managing paper records remains a major challenge for organisations of all sizes but particularly for those who manage legacy documentation collated before the adoption of a digital platform.
Without a centralised and automated data management approach, organisations will find themselves pestering clients repeatedly for missing or additional documentation that might have been acquired in the past – which isn’t conducive of a happy or productive customer relationship.
A cloud-based core banking system with a single storage and management platform of different types of account documents boosts operational efficiency and productivity. These documents can be made demanded as part of the loan approval process.
All client documents should be made available on the system, greatly reducing the risk of losing sensitive information, as well as streamlining the approval process. For example, a fully digital document management function improves both the efficiency of the compliance process and the quality of the work of a credit officer without impacting client experience across the loan approval process. This in turn reduces the time between application and disbursement and limits the risks of fraud.
Conclusion
You already know the value of technology, but ensuring you have the right cloud-based solution to enable effective client relationship management is a major challenge.
The spread of client-centric relationship management has revolutionised financial service delivery. It has empowered decisionmakers with more visibility over the client relationship management process by giving them enormous amounts of useful data.
Digitalising the client onboarding experience with cloud solutions help financial institutions streamline the end-to-end client lifecycle management and assessment of risk as part of the KYC, AML, and CDD process.
Digitalisation allows organisations to create a frictionless customer journey with lower costs compared to manual procedures involving multiple channel handovers. The commitment to client satisfaction is no longer a dream, but meaningful and easy to achieve with the use of these client-centric, cloud-based core banking solutions.
