Digital Customer Onboarding Vendor Spectrum: Corporate Banking Edition

Digitizing commercial and corporate customer onboarding requires not only resources but also fortitude and perseverance. The size of the prize makes the effort worth it. Successful top tier banks report dramatic reduction in onboarding times from weeks to days. The revenue boost from serving a large corporation three weeks sooner could easily be over a $100,000. Moreover, the beginning of a client relationship sets the tone for deepening the relationship. Banks in the digital vanguard have found that if clients have a positive digital onboarding experience, they will likely use both the bank’s self-service and unattended (host-to-host) channels more.

Clients are not the only winners. Banks state that their relationship managers report improved job satisfaction as they can focus more on adding value for clients by gaining 10% to 15% extra capacity. The bank overall wins by reducing their costs through automation and error reduction with some reporting errors down from 60% to 5% and processing time down as short as a sixth of the time.

Figure 1: Step Change in Digital Onboarding

In this report, Celent examines the best practices of the pacesetter banks in digital onboarding. For banks that are considering how to join the pacesetters, we profile and evaluate three vendors—Deluxe, FMR Systems, and Pega—which have a mature end-to-end onboarding solution that is capable of handling the complex onboarding of a large corporation with multiple entities, thirty plus products, and demanding service level agreements.