The future of onboarding in the financial market

What will the future of the onboarding process at financial institutions in the Netherlands look like? And which role can PwC play in this? In our vision, we state that effortless digital onboarding is conditional on the arrival of a standard for personal, digital identification. We have identified three customer groups: consumers, SME clients and corporate clients.

‘Any successful onboarding process must be embedded in the wider social trends. Transparency is one of those’

Thomas Rijneveld, PwC Financial Services director

‘Transparency and trust are preconditions’

Any successful onboarding process must be embedded in the wider social trends. ‘Transparency is one of those’, says Thomas Rijneveld, PwC Financial Services director ‘When customers share information with the bank during the onboarding process, they want to maintain more control over this than before. Can the customer easily see this information online, and perhaps even retrieve it at the touch of a button? These are questions that must be addressed in the design, for both consumers and SME and corporate clients. PwC can offer support with the standards for technical security.’

Trust is another precondition when designing the onboarding process of the future. Thomas Rijneveld: ‘Both the bank and the customer want to have confidence that the data is secure. This applies particularly when a new utility entity that will handle valuable data from multinationals is launched.’ PwC has previously set up a utility entity for banking operations on Guernsey.

Eight components of the onboarding process

How can financial institutions optimise the onboarding process for the future? Based on our international experience, we have developed the following eight components, which all require attention in the design and during implementation.

Governance and organisation

Decide who is responsible for the onboarding process and make sure that the corporate culture fits the customer needs.

Experience design

Ensure that the customer can make requests himself through all channels and that giving feedback is possible on all channels, regardless of the channel of the request.

Process

Smoothen the processes and make it as simple as possible for the customer to only receive what he/she needs.

Risk

Implement a method for risk valuation, in combination with a central database and advanced data analysis.

Compliance

Integrate the onboarding process with central compliance and monitoring of local and global processes.

Digitalisation and automatisation

Use less paper, more workflowsoftware and add customer documents to it.

Data integration

Centralise the data collection, make a realtime 360-degree image of the customer and ensure that the information addressed to the customer is personal and context-dependent.