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Banking Customer Onboarding Requirements List

What Not to Forget

When considering creation of a bank digital customer onboarding and acquisition system, it is easy to overlook the complexity of the whole process.  Often the focus begins with web forms, and only later expands to cover the entire transaction, interaction across channels, integrations with 3^rd parties and the range of functions required for a successful bank customer onboarding experience.

Why is Bank Customer Onboarding and Acquisition so Hard?

Typically, application development runs into problems around these technical categories:

• Omnichannel Customer Experience Multiple devices, assisted channels, optimizing the customer experience
• Orchestration of Customer Engagement
• Anonymous and known customers, connections to FinTech services and core systems
• Managing Data throughout the Transaction
• Review and approval, Save and Resume, Bundle documents into a transaction
• Security, Reliability, Extensibility
• Manage PII, Security requirements, APIs for extensions, Continuous Integration

Business requirements for the Bank Customer Onboarding system need to include specific capabilities in each category in order to ensure program success.

Omnichannel Customer Experience

• Deliver a web application suitable for use in presales “new to bank” situations with no download or prior account registration.
• Create responsive applications that can be designed once and used across any device including smartphones, tablets, or desktop.
• Template-based form design, including embedded look & feel, navigation, and accessibility, allowing “approval once” and then the creation of many forms.
• Handle navigation semantics for forms on a wide range of device sizes.
• Manage error handling and error display across different device types and sizes.
• Create Omnichannel web applications for use across digital, call center, and branch.
• Address functionality differences across channels from a single implementation. For example, a file picker on the desktop may become a camera on a mobile device.
• Create applications designed for assisted channels, used by both applicant and customer-facing bank employee, sharing the same data throughout the application completion process.
• Build a data-driven capability to continuously measure, analyze, iterate, and optimize forms and CX, based on actual customer results.
• Introduce A/B testing to evaluate changes and measure customer preferences.

Orchestration of Customer Engagement Process

The onboarding and acquisition system functions as an integration hub to control the flow of the customer transaction among the applicants, external FinTech services, and the bank core systems. Specifically:

• Need to orchestrate inputs and outputs of multiple external services as part of a financial product application—such as KYC, identity verification, fraud detection, and financial history.
• Multiple FinTech services are required for onboarding, and banks look for pre-integrated connections to those services from an integration hub, rather than having to integrate each individually. Examples include imaging, e-signature, fraud detection, or social media connections.
• Handle both anonymous and previously identified applicants, offering the lowest friction path for each.
• Implement single sign-on for the application process.

Transactions are complex enough that they may take anywhere from seconds to weeks to complete, and data must persist through the duration of the transaction.

• Utilize existing back-office systems to prefill an application for a financial product.
• Use Salesforce or other CRM to push prefilled application forms out to customers.
• Capture customer-facing form input directly into CRM (such as Salesforce) business processes.
• For straight-through processing of account opening transactions, the platform must initiate the account provisioning, gather the output from the core system, and return the completed account opening information to the customer.

Manage the Data Throughout the Transaction

The platform must maintain the data associated with the bank onboarding transaction as it accumulates from all channels, whether the transaction takes seconds, days or weeks to complete.

• Manage applicant workflow for both internal and external audiences.
• Support Review and Approval for complex approval processes – with multiple documents, approvers, sections, and countries.
• Encrypt and maintain the security of all data while in process.
• Manage the transient data storage for the transaction in-flight, including the file system, database and schema, and all associated security, performance, and redundancy.
• Support anonymous authenticated external, and directory authenticated internal applicants and system users.
• Enable Save and Resume, allowing applicants to stop and restart an application, on different channels, without loss of prior content.
• Generate and maintain access codes allowing applicants to resume saved applications without having to create a login and password.
• Create digital receipts for the applicant and a copy of the completed, signed application for the bank records.
• Capture user input just once, then generate multiple data streams to satisfy business process silos, compliance, and government requirements.
• Bundle multiple documents from a single input, ensuring back office silos get only the information they need.
• Allow the applicant to switch between forms or chain the forms 1-2-3.
• Create separate logic for each form.
• Handle email and delivery of receipts to the applicant.
• Upload, storage, and handling of attachments bundling into the completed application.

Security, Reliability, Extensibility, Scalability, and Operations

And finally, the role of the bank onboarding systems is to manage customer PII during the transaction, secure it, and ensure it is cleaned from the system when the transaction is complete:

• Integrate encryption management to control access to PII and comply with banking requirements.
• Store sensitive PII data until the transaction is complete, then ensure it is purged from the system to meet privacy and compliance requirements.
• Allow customizable policies for purging and data retention periods.
• Expose standards-based APIs for exchange of collected applicant data with service layer and core systems.
• Deliver all above features as a standard set of packaged services, available to any new form or product. This will allow scalability across multiple projects, rather than require a series of one-off projects that re-create the same services each time.
• Include logging to retain and access logging for security, audit, and compliance.
• Create an operational user interface to administer, monitor, and troubleshoot the production system.
• View in-flight transactions and their state – saved, opened, or abandoned.
• Error handling, monitoring, and logging.
• Set granular access controls for employees, applicants, and administrators for access to applications and private data.
• User management to cover external applicants, internal bankers, and system operations staff, in particular supporting both anonymous and authenticated applicants.
• Integrate with SSO and LDAP authentication systems.
• Establish provisions for redundancy, quality of service, and disaster recovery.
• Establish DevOps and provisions for continuous integration.