Reinventing business onboarding: A personalised approach

As technologies evolve and customer expectations rise, the traditional methods of onboarding new clients are becoming outdated and inefficient. You only need to think back to when you last signed up for a personal bank account, especially one of the newer digital first banks. Compare the speed, ease and overall experience to that same process for a business bank account instead. The difference is light years apart. So why is that? 

For the majority of cases B2B onboarding, whether that’s for opening a bank account, verifying a marketplace seller or signing up to a payment service provider are all significantly trailing their B2C equivalents. Why is this the case?

To be fair, business onboarding is more complex. Understanding convoluted company structures, verifying financials and ensuring there are no associated PEPs, sanctions or adverse media are essential to ensure regulatory compliance; which if not adhered to can result in hefty fines.

However, this still doesn’t justify sending your prospective customer a 30 page long uneditable application form that requires hours of manual input, only for every answer to then be duplicated by someone in the compliance team into a spreadsheet for a custom formula to spit out an estimation of risk (Believe it or not, this is the a real process we’ve seen).

B2B onboarding can be reinvented through a personalised approach that stops catering towards edge cases and focuses on the fact that the vast majority of customers are genuine, well-meaning organisations. Organisations that are eager to use your products and services and in turn generate revenue for your company.

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‍The current approach to business onboarding: ‍

The onboarding process is still mired in outdated practices. As highlighted in the earlier example, companies often rely on generic, inflexible forms that are cumbersome for users to fill out and for businesses to process. Communications with the customer take place over email, there’s a growing friction between internal teams and there’s no visibility over the process.

This one-size-fits-all approach fails for many reasons:‍

The diversity of your products/services: The information you need to know changes based on the product your customer is signing up for. Imagine you’re running a supermarket - anyone can buy an orange, but you need to prove that your customer is over eighteen to buy alcohol. Business onboarding should be approached in the same way.

The diversity of your customers: Your customers may come from all corners of the world, some may be sole traders, while others may be multinational corporations. It should be clear that using the same onboarding process would not be suitable for them both. Returning to our supermarket analogy - proving your customer is eighteen may be enough to buy alcohol in the UK, but say you have a store in America, you would need to up this to twenty-one.‍

The diversity in data availability: There is going to be a variety in the information available on your customers. Some organisations will have plenty of data widely available: annual reports published, directors listed and core information that can be easily found on registries. Others may not even have a website. The onboarding process needs to be able to accommodate these variations.

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‍The benefits of a personalised approach to onboarding:

Enhanced customer experience‍

Tailoring the onboarding experience to fit the specific requirements of each client not only demonstrates a deep understanding of their unique business but also significantly boosts their trust, engagement and satisfaction.

Think back to the three reasons mentioned above, if you configure the onboarding journey to be relevant to the desired product/service, request information that is appropriate to their country of origin and don’t make them input data that is readily available, they will have a much better experience.

Having this flexibility in your onboarding processes goes a long way; this personal touch can help in building a solid foundation for long-term business relationships.‍

Faster onboarding time‍

Personalised onboarding processes are designed to be efficient. By anticipating and incorporating the specific needs of each client right from the start, the time typically spent making adjustments and corrections is drastically reduced. This means clients can start benefiting from your services much sooner and you generate revenue quicker.

Faster onboarding can also be achieved by remembering that not all clients are bad actors. The onboarding process should be streamlined and the information requested as minimal as possible so that higher volumes of customers can be approved in a shorter period of time. It should only be when there is an edge case that you need access to enhanced due diligence tooling to comprehensively ensure that the customer complies. ‍

Better data collection‍

Poor onboarding will often result in poor data collection and verification while also requiring a lot of manual input. Menial tasks such as copying and pasting data from one system to another, having to compare and analyse user-entered data to data obtained from a data source and verifying the validity of documents all reduce the efficiency of onboarding. The compliance team is burdened by the sheer amount of manual workload required to onboard a single company.

A personalised approach to onboarding should streamline this by only requesting relevant information from the user while already having data sourced information populated.

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Achieving personalised onboarding:‍

‍No more spreadsheets ‍

Modern onboarding should leverage technology to offer a seamless, user-friendly experience through a web-based platform. These platforms allow users to start the onboarding process, pause, and resume at their convenience without losing progress. Furthermore, integrating these platforms with existing case management systems eliminates the need for manual data entry and collation, streamlining the entire process and reducing the potential for errors. Enhanced features such as real-time validation of data and integration with other digital tools can further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the onboarding process, making it not just faster but also more enjoyable for the client.

‍One size does not fit all‍

The flexibility to configure onboarding flows according to specific parameters like country, company size, or service type is another crucial improvement. This approach ensures that clients are only presented with relevant fields and documents, significantly simplifying their experience and speeding up the onboarding process by removing unnecessary steps. Additionally, sophisticated algorithms can be employed to dynamically adjust the flow based on the input provided by the client, ensuring that the process is as streamlined as possible. This adaptability not only improves user satisfaction but also aids in compliance with local regulations and industry standards, which can vary significantly across regions and sectors.‍

A white glove service‍

There are some instances where customer value demands another degree of personalisation during onboarding. Advanced personalisation involves preparing the onboarding process based on preliminary understanding and research into the client’s needs. By pre-filling certain information and tailoring the onboarding steps, companies can significantly reduce the client's workload, thereby enhancing their overall experience and demonstrating a high level of commitment and respect for their time and business. This can also include providing dedicated support during the onboarding process to ensure any questions or concerns are addressed promptly.

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‍Detected: Reinventing Business Onboarding‍

Business onboarding is a competitive advantage. Efficient business onboarding reduces time to revenue, reduces manual touchpoints and the number of systems used. Some companies have realised that and offer streamlined sign up processes to their customers, while internally have smooth integrated systems that provide visibility to all teams involved. In contrast, as mentioned throughout this article, others still send out a PDF document.

Detected is reinventing business onboarding by providing a fully configurable, scalable and flexible platform. The front-end onboarding flow is fully customisable ensuring that customers will go down the right onboarding journey based on any number of custom distinctions. Detected’s intelligence engine and risk, fraud and compliance ecosystem remove manual workload by collecting data and populating it into a company profile. The case management system allows for an efficient compliance review with all the information acquired from onboarding and data sources displayed in a single company profile which can be linked to existing systems and CRMs.