Digital Account Opening in Financial Services
Overview
Document processing for new accounts is one of the most costly expenditures of financial organizations who use manual labor, rather than automation, to complete necessary tasks. In a market filled with competitors, it’s essential that banks utilize both time and cost-efficient systems to retain and grow their all-important customer base.
Improve the customer experience by accelerating account openings and ensuring an accurate dossier with DocProStar. Artificial intelligence is utilized to ensure complete and accurate dossiers, meaning accounts are opened quickly, and with minimal human intervention. Full compliance and control over the whole transaction, from customer arrival to confirmation of account opening, ensures a high quality customer experience.
THE SCENARIO
An increase in the demand for technological convenience when opening a new account makes it more and more necessary that banks create a frictionless process for new customers. Competition for customers abounds and leveraging on-demand services that enable consumers to digitally create accounts in minutes is key to success. Without the ability to compete at this level, traditional brick-and-mortar banks will gradually lose customer base. With DocProStar, existing systems can still be used, while allowing banks to improve processing speed to ensure lower costs and fewer errors.
Account opening processes are complicated by nature
Opening accounts requires multiple documents, usually full of personal information, in order to create a complete dossier. Individual applicants must submit these documents for review, and full compliance is necessary in order to obtain a thorough collection of data from which to make a decision. A huge variety in types of documentation, plus photos, electronic documents and the like must be reviewed against a set of internal checks to prohibit financial crimes, such as money laundering or fraud. With all that is required to compile complete dossiers, or a complete picture of the customer and his or her potential risk, it’s inevitable that the account opening process creates a challenge for financial institutions.
Many different documents means more time processing
A typical account opening dossier includes more than ten different documents, including account contract, customer ID, proof of both residence and income, and other documents specific to the banking product, account type or region. In legacy banking environments, a person must sort through all of these documents to ensure that the necessary documents have been provided in the dossier. Once confirmed, the data supplied must be reviewed for accuracy and checked for possible missing information, which can further slow the process. Any lack of compliance from the applicant is yet another factor to increase personnel time spent on one application. Additionally, this assumes the personnel has been trained and is up-to-date on all regulatory changes and compliance, and leaves the customer open to personal data risk.
Manual data entry introduces higher rates of human error
Because many documents are necessary to create a dossier and all must be reviewed, manual entry is required to input data into the transactional banking system. The method of manual entry is often prone to human error. This results in additional time spent correcting these issues or potential disruptions down the line that could negatively impact the customer experience. With seemingly endless competition, the possibility of losing an applicant due to manual entry inaccuracies is possible and further damages the financial institution’s image.
Slow, manual processes create high costs and risk
For every 1000 account openings per day, traditional banks need up to 15-20 full-time employees (FTEs) to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and classify, extract, validate, and review the information provided in account opening dossier documents. To make matters worse, for banks that have SLAs for account opening within 1-3 hours, much of this manual validation takes place after the account is opened–creating a period of vulnerability for the bank until the data is confirmed. This leaves the bank exposed to potential threats within the system which can result in even higher costs.
“As we enter a new decade, banks and credit unions must rethink their strategies and priorities as data and analytics is applied to product development, distribution, innovation, back office support and improved customer experiences. Now is the time for a ‘disruptive mindset’ in banking.”
THE SOLUTION
Instead of relying on manual entry and hours of additional labor, DocProStar digitizes and standardizes documents for further review. All required documents are then organized into a complete dossier. Artificial intelligence, not bank workers, then classify all documents and determine their type. Financial institutions can easily create processes ensure all necessary information is provided before moving onto data extraction from the documents, quickly adapting them as regulatory or compliance changes are required. Finally, DocProStar verifies that all information provided is accurate before sending information on to downstream systems.