Millennium Trust Company is a leading provider of custodian banking services to 620,000 individual and institutional clients across the United States. As it launched a digital transformation program several years ago, it asked itself a question familiar to every financial service provider: how to deliver a first-class experience during every customer interaction?

Established in 2000, high-quality service has been integral to Millennium Trust’s growth. Today, the firm manages $26.4 billion in client assets. The company’s services include holding and managing alternative assets, such as private equity, real estate and precious metals, and self-directed and rollover individual retirement accounts (IRAs).

Millennium Trust offers clients expert advice and access to many investment types but realized that it could make its account opening process much faster and more convenient. Other providers had been quick to develop slick digital platforms to help new clients navigate the onboarding process. To sharpen its competitive edge, Millennium Trust knew it was time for an innovative new approach.

Moving Beyond Manual Workflows

Millennium Trust identified several key areas of its onboarding process for improvement. First and foremost, the company looked to eliminate the paper forms that it previously used to gather customer data. By digitizing these steps, Millennium Trust also realized that it could significantly reduce the workload of its internal operations teams, who were tasked with entering the customer information into its systems and chasing up extra details.

Deployment process, including testing and integration with its core banking, accounting and document repository systems, in just six months

Bob Kunimura, Chief Technology Officer at Millennium Trust Company explains: “We wanted to redesign our onboarding and transaction process to ensure a faster, frictionless customer experience. To achieve this, we sought a digital platform that enables users to complete the account setup and verification process steps online, without the hassle of dealing with any paper forms.”

Optimizing Internal Processes

Addressing the existing manuals workflows was a particular priority for Millennium Trust’s rollover IRA service. The company would experience seasonal peaks in demand at the end of each calendar year for automatic rollovers, placing extra pressure on the back-office team. To cope with the rise in business volumes, Millennium Trust previously hired extra staff—but now it wanted to find a more cost-efficient approach.

Bob Kunimura continues: “Moving to a digital platform would also enable us to make many internal efficiency gains and optimize key business processes. We realised that reducing the amount of manual processing would free our internal teams to work more productively. During the seasonal peaks in rollover IRA applications, we would be able to maintain continuity of service and avoid having to take on temporary staff.”

Digitalizing Workflows

To support creation of the new online platform for account opening, Millennium Trust implemented Temenos Infinity solutions. Following a business analysis and planning phase of four months, Millennium Trust completed the deployment process, including testing and integration with its core banking, accounting and document repository systems, in just six months.

“The Temenos platform offered us exactly what we wanted. There was no need for any customisation, so we could get up and running quickly, while the integration capabilities enabled us to connect the new onboarding platform with our critical back-end systems. The scalability and security of the Temenos solution also gave us the confidence it would handle surges in application volumes without a hitch.”

Bob Kunimura, Chief Technology Officer

Using the Temenos solution, Millennium Trust developed an easy-to-use, omnichannel account opening process. Customers can fill in the necessary forms via desktop, mobile or tablet, with the most important sections highlighted and guidance provided to accelerate completion. The system also automatically checks the data for errors, alerting the client so that they change the information.

Delivering High-Quality Customer Experiences

Supported by Temenos Infinity, Millennium Trust ensures that customers can access its services with speed and convenience. The company estimates that new customers complete the intuitive online forms in just 13 minutes, on average. Clients are taking advantage of the flexibility of the omnichannel service, with 68 percent of users accessing via desktop, 25 percent via mobile, and 7 percent via tablet.

In addition, the Temenos platform enabled Millennium Trust to slash the level of paper-based manual working required to process applications. Bob Kunimura continues: “We believe that 72 percent of our clients now enjoy fully automated straight-through-processing, without the need for any of our operations team members to intervene during the application.

“Overall, we have accelerated rollover account opening and processing by more than 60 percent, with every aspect of the procedure completed within ten days. We are also much better prepared for seasonal surges in business volumes, and avoid the costs of bringing in extra staff. Once we had the solution in place, it did not take long for us to work to reduce our backlog of applications by two-thirds.”

Focusing on Client Relationships

Since the launch of the new online process, Millennium Trust has achieved major efficiency gains across the business. With the Temenos solution providing higher quality customer data, less time is spent chasing applicants for extra information. Similarly, more user-friendly online forms have helped to reduce the number of client inquiries to the company’s call center.

Bob Kunimura adds: “Our teams are now free from assessing and re-keying data from countless paper forms. Instead, they can focus on operational excellence and building stronger relationships with our clients. In total, we estimate that we have saved more than one million minutes for our operational teams through the introduction of our digital account opening platform.”

He concludes: “Working with Temenos has been an excellent experience, transforming a key element of our client journey to a market-leading omnichannel digital experience. We have positioned ourselves as a real innovator in the custody services sector, and added another dimension to the high-quality service that we always strive to deliver.”