Onboarding is arguably the most important step in a client’s journey — it is a critical point in the advisor-client relationship where you make a first impression, gather information, and talk about your services to help your clients achieve their financial goals.
As your technology partner, we are an extension of your business offering and a reflection on your business. Your clients’ first impression of our platform should surprise and delight them and set their expectations going forward. Today, we offer a digital client onboarding experience that involves the collection of client data through surveys, portfolio recommendations, and electronic signatures. These are required pieces for us to collect — but they may not offer the most delightful experience for a client. We want the onboarding journey to be engaging, simple, and fun.
Let’s take a look at our goals and how we plan to make onboarding engaging, simple, and fun
Goal 1: Actionable insights into the investors onboarding journey
Advisors and investors should both have deep visibility into an investor’s onboarding journey. This could include a status tracker, alerts and notifications, or a dashboard with insights. You should always know when something is needed or if something is stuck. This visibility should empower advisors to know when and how to reach out to their clients.
Goal 2: Efficiency with the right amount of customization for your investors
Both advisors and investors should be able to edit or add in information during the onboarding process — and this should not delay or stop the onboarding process unless necessary. They should also choose where their onboarding journey starts and select their own personal preferences to make it easy to complete. These preferences may include language, a preferred method of communication, and others.
Goal 3: Intelligent data capture with unlimited insights
We should capture the required data needed from an investor in the most efficient and effective way possible. There should be no need to ask duplicate questions. It is then key for us to turn our data into insights. Key improvements could be to reduce onboarding time by X (or reduce drop-off) and draw behavioural insights from how investors behave throughout their onboarding journey so advisors can have important and informed conversations with their clients.
We want to take this opportunity to show you our roadmap that will get us closer to these goals and provide context into why our roadmap has been prioritized this way. The roadmap aims to bring us closer to achieving these objectives, providing a transparent view of our commitment to optimizing client onboarding, refining wealth management processes, and fostering efficient financial planning.
Onboarding Roadmap (in development)
This section covers priorities that are currently in development and are not likely to change or be de-prioritized. The estimated timeframe for the below items is 3–6 months.
Build the components of onboarding so portfolio managers can configure them
Survey engine. Rebuild our survey engine to allow for personalized onboarding questions that reflect the uniqueness of your business and offering.
Account opening. Capture only necessary or insightful data and provide a guided account opening experience.
Integrate the components of our onboarding into our Investor Portal defined by their language preference
Onboarding will live in the Investor Portal, so the investor has one place to start and track their journey.
Partner with a financial data connectivity firm
This will allow for automatic bank and ID verification at first and then transform into a partnership to provide data and insights on a new client’s complete financial picture
Onboarding Roadmap (future)
This section covers items that are subject to change but reflect our current prioritization within onboarding. The estimated timeframe for the below items is 6–12 months and beyond.
Deep insights into onboarding
Surface key milestones in an investor’s onboarding journey. This could notify you when something is needed or provide first impression insights.
Creating the right path and surveys to make for a delightful onboarding experience
Simplify the risk survey itself. This could mean a reduction of questions or a more educational onboarding journey.
Let the financial advisor or investor decide where they want to begin their onboarding journey (i.e., start with the risk survey or KYC).
Preferences
Offer a multilingual product where an investor can select English or French.
Using principles of diversity and inclusion to build an onboarding journey that is easy and accessible for an investor to complete.
Have any feedback for us? We’d be happy to hear it. Send us a note. Our onboarding roadmap reflects our commitment to elevating the client experience. As we embark on this journey, we look forward to welcoming new clients and ensuring that their wealth management onboarding is not only efficient but also tailored to their individual preferences and needs.
