Digital customer onboarding journeys

We specialise in digital customer journey orchestration. It’s all about optimising their onboarding experience.

Convert more customers into borrowers, more efficiently, more responsibly, and with lower regulatory risk.

What is digital customer onboarding?

In today’s world, customers have come to expect fast, convenient and reliable digital journeys. The most common digital journey is the checkout process. It’s simple because everyone is largely required to share the same information.

A digital onboarding journey, on the other hand, is more complicated. It has to answer the question “Am I able to serve this customer?”. It seeks to understand who the applicant is and assess whether the product or service is right for them and vice versa.

This means the onboarding process needs to acquire as much relevant information as possible to adequately determine the applicants suitability for the given service. A comprehensive onboarding process is critical when it involves complex products and services, where customer circumstances define their suitability.

Customer onboarding is especially important for businesses in the finance industry, which are particularly vulnerable to compliance, regulatory and fraud risk such as banks and other financial services, and lenders. These businesses need to verify their applicants’ identities by performing customer due diligence (CDD) assessments, following KYC and AML guidelines.

How to manage lending risk painlessly ►

What challenges does onboarding present?

When it comes to customer journey orchestration, it is critical to optimise conversion. This involves removing all friction, anything that might slow down or get in the way of journey completion. However, onboarding journeys often aim to introduce friction, acting as a barrier that only lets certain applicants through.

Digital onboarding journeys must be able to deal with complexity and diversity among applicants. Oversimplifying leads to a poor understanding of their circumstances. However, complexity increases friction. So, the challenge for onboarding is to accept the complexities, adequately explore them, but always minimise the inevitable friction it creates.

Today, most onboarding processes treat everyone largely the same. They are prescriptive, ask the same questions and request the same data. They are predefined and inflexible. Making changes to them is usually slow and costly. Business understanding and innovation goes far faster than technology’s capability to adapt to it.

What does good onboarding look like?

Good onboarding is flexible in terms of how it engages with the customer, in its questioning, decisioning and in its outcomes. Flexible in terms of how it can be adapted, and who adapts it.

It understands that every applicant is different and complex. It only asks relevant questions to get the right information required for each individual. It knows when digital interaction is appropriate, and when to get a real person involved. It is as long as it needs to be, but as short as it can be.

The paradigm must reverse. Hard coded journeys can’t prescribe what analytics has. Analytics have to drive dynamic onboarding journeys that execute what it needs. These processes must move from being controlled by IT to being controlled by executive teams. This was the motivation behind PrinSIX.

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