As a growing start-up, focused on providing the absolute best end-to-end digital on-boarding experience for our clients, we continually engage our customers to ensure we are evolving and reevaluating our solution to provide product-market fit. This means delivering a solution that’s intuitive and solves real problems.
In the early stages of our product development cycle, we wanted to provide a form solution for people like you and me, the average punter, your mums and dads of the world. And we did just that. But here’s where the problem lies….we focused so hard on getting it right for our direct clients, we failed to see the bigger picture….the journey of the application.
The problem
You see, in the financial services game, advisers, brokers and the like are responsible for 90% of the inflows received by a fund or institution, yet most organisations are failing to recognise the criticality of getting it right for these clients. Instead, they continue to focus their digital customer experience on a small segment of their overall inflows-direct clients.
I have spoken to countless advisers and brokers, big and small, and the story is always the same-client on-boarding sucks big time. It’s tedious, repetitive, frustrating and the overall experience is very 1980s. Even with a digital solution, most advisers are resorting to paper applications because the digital journey is still more cumbersome for them and ignores how channel partners manage their workflow.
The solution
To solve this problem, we first wanted to really understand how channel partners currently onboarded their clients. Most are using paper, however, the really savvy ones are using writable PDF’s-just a neater version of the same problem. We then mapped out their ideal on-boarding experience. Here’s what we learnt:
They want to be able to import their client records directly from their CRM and map these records directly into an application/BAU form.
They want to be able to create customised templates for the applications to cater for different types of features and portfolio allocations.
They don’t want to enter a client’s information more than once (including AML)
They want a form solution that allows them to move freely through the application process without being restricted by validators and logic (many channel partners only have limited information when they start the application process.
They want a secure environment to manage the on-boarding process from start to finish.
If an organisation is serious about solving its digital on-boarding problems, you first need to really understand the channel of the inflows for your business and focus on getting that experience right, otherwise, you’ll end up like all the other pretty application forms gathering digital dust.