The first few minutes of a digital onboarding journey are all it takes for a customer to judge how the rest of their banking experience will feel. A slow and clunky app, confusing and too many fields, being asked information which you expect the bank to already know - each friction point pushes customers toward competitors who are easier to deal with, and again, the customer's already making this choice as soon as they start their onboarding.
You might think that someone abandoning an application just means fewer customers to process. In reality, the bank is losing trust of the customer as well as that of their friends and family, who they're likely to tell about the poor experience. That kind of trust and brand impression is hard to win back.
Improving that digital onboarding experience warrants more than just removing a field or two. You have to actually design the entire onboarding experience around how customers or corporate entities think. They just want to open their account as soon as possible and with as few hurdles as possible.
Trust is what holds the entire banking industry together. It's what customers want to experience every step of the way. The problem here is that banks can't wait weeks or months to convince a new customer to invest in a long-term relationship.
Most customers already make a mental note of whether a bank is worth sticking with before they've even made their first transaction. They make that decision during onboarding, and while banks continue to spend heavily on acquisition, they're also losing a major share of those customers before the relationship even starts.
Fenergo points out that the banking industry is losing around $3.3 billion in business every year because one in every five onboarding applications gets abandoned. That has nothing to do with what your bank offers or doesn't. It's about the process. It's about making a new customer feel comfortable from the start.
Those first impressions are critical. A clunky digital onboarding in banking only convinces the customer that the rest of their journey is going to be the same.
Banks have several touchpoints during the onboarding process. Each one of those has the chance to add enough friction to force the customer to drop off. Let’s see how that works in practice.
Handing out a thick stack of forms to fill out is the first point of friction. They often have fields asking for information that the bank already has somewhere in its systems.
It gets even worse. Customers are quick to notice that those long forms ask the same questions on different pages or unclear document requirements that don’t explain why they’re needed.
Digitizing this same process doesn't remove the friction. Deloitte found that an optimized digital flow takes around 41 taps to open an account. If that looks a lot, it's actually somewhere between 70 and 144, depending on the bank. The thing to understand here is that every extra tap is one more reason for the customer to just abandon the app and look elsewhere.
Completing the form, however, doesn’t mean customers are free from data requests. Banks tend to call several times during onboarding because they’re collecting or verifying documentation piece by piece. That just mars the entire purpose of a digital onboarding journey.
We're not saying that banks should be lenient when it comes to verification. It's a critical part of the journey. But testing a customer's patience with slow checks and manual reviews that may stall applications is just a way to push them out the door.
Irony is that KYC costs the bank as well. PwC puts this around 3% of a bank's total cost base, which amounts to $60 million on average per year. That's a stark loss when you also consider that a meaningful share of digital identity checks still fail, dumping customers into manual review queues.
This is perhaps the most consistent point of frustration during a bank's digital onboarding process, especially in corporate banking. A customer who has finally cleared all identity checks is now ready to commit. So imagine their frustration when funding their account becomes the next obstacle they must clear.
The Financial Brand notes that 70% of all new branch accounts are opened with a balance of $100 or more. That number drops to under 29% when moving to online account openings. That gap highlights how digital funding usually has more friction in comparison to just going to a branch. That same gap is also a major source of losing bank deposits.
The final hitch in the process is how approved accounts just sit there. The customer never logs in or makes any transactions.
Your abandonment metrics never pick up on this because the account is technically not abandoned. It's just not being used. Such accounts still cost the bank because they've spent on acquiring the customer and moving them through the onboarding process. But the bank can never recover its costs if the customer doesn't use their account.
One fix rarely puts a new shine on your entire onboarding process. This is especially true for corporate banking since they tend to have much longer onboarding. You have to treat onboarding as one connected journey. Each fix reinforces the other, meaning they won't have that much of an impact if you treat them in isolation.
Only ask for information that you don't have. Hooking your onboarding to all your data sources through API integrations means that a customer has fewer fields to fill out.
The system automatically pulls and populates the information your bank has. It makes the process faster and ensures the customer doesn't bail. This is one of the most direct and easy ways to shorten a digital onboarding process in banking without cutting any compliance requirements.
Make identity checks part of the application flow. That means customers verify themselves while filling out the digital application instead of being routed to another tool.
If you need their photos, add a step in the process to guide the customer to snap a selfie in real time. Remember to add clear prompts for lighting and angles to reduce rejected uploads.
The same goes for any identification cards; simply take a picture using the same app and let the system do the rest. This removes an entire layer of friction on its own.
As for validating documents, do that the second they come in instead of reviewing them in batches later on. This way, a customer finds out about a problem in their documents immediately. That's always better than sending a rejection email a week later and asking them to start over.
This is a pretty basic UX requirement, but one that many digital banking apps ignore. Regardless of how short an onboarding process is, you can't expect customers to complete it all in a single sitting. Most take a break while filling out a form or close the app because they have to find a specific document. Your banking app will lose all meaning if they return to find that they have to start all over again.
But the value here goes much further than just convenience. Acquiring new customers is expensive. Saving progress and letting customers resume where they left off is a much cheaper alternative that significantly reduces abandonment rates and improves satisfaction.
Compliance is not something you can overlook so easily. This is especially true for corporate banking where most applications will never qualify for instant decisions. However, there are still low-risk segments (or applicants) that can be pushed forward without making them wait.
Remember that waiting kills momentum. You want a customer to complete their onboarding as quickly as possible. Straight-through processing handles the simple cases and frees your compliance teams to focus where it actually matters.
The easiest trick in the book for a speedy onboarding process is to make sure the customer never stops at any point. But what happens when they're stuck on something? Maybe they're confused about a certain field or need additional clarification. They'll likely want answers right away.
Including tooltips, hints, and a clear FAQ can help but customers often just want the answer from a live agent. It's easier to ask follow-up questions that way.
The most efficient solution to this is to have a chatbot within the app that pops up the moment it notices the customer is struggling. That proactive assistance matters most during identity verification where patients tend to run out quickly. Getting real-time support without leaving the app works wonders in improving your completion rates.
Some customers are still going to abandon their application regardless. The sign of a good bank is that they're prepared for that reality. They have metrics in place that tell them exactly where applications were abandoned. This data helps their support team to reach out and offer assistance.
The messaging here matters. Sending a generic "finish your application" push notification is just noise. Sending a direct link to resume the application from where the customer left off, and with manual support on the line, has a better chance to win them back.
Explain why business clients are harder to onboard than individuals, with business verification, beneficial owners, multiple approvers, and heavier document demands. They generally require more complex workflows compared to retail. Show how to keep the flow digital while a relationship manager handles the complex parts.
Corporate banking generally has a much longer and more complex onboarding cycle than retail. Clients expect tailored solutions to problems a regular retail customer will never face. There's also a demand for a higher level of service efficiency that goes beyond the normal range.
A whole lot more documents and verifications
A typical corporate onboarding can take up to six weeks. More complex enterprises can double that timeframe due to the significant amount of paperwork and compliance requirements in the mix.
You have different forms for different reasons - your standard opening forms, entity profile forms, authorization and board resolution forms, compliance forms, tax forms, just to name a few.
Each one of them has to be reviewed and verified before moving forward. It's also worth noting that unlike regular clients, corporate customers are subject to stricter requirements. Banks aren't just verifying identification and ownership. They're also ensuring that everything complies with AML and KYC regulations.
A pause at any one point just prolongs the entire onboarding process, creating more friction for both banks and corporations.
Multiple stakeholders are involved
Those increased volumes of touchpoints that we mentioned previously? They are all backed by their own decision-makers. It's not like retail banking where a single customer can complete the entire onboarding process themselves.
Corporate banking involves entire finance and compliance teams. You also have treasury managers and legal aids, along with other stakeholders who have to give their approval before an account can be opened. This adds a whole layer of coordination and complexity that further stretches the process.
Higher Risk Assessments
Corporate accounts often involve larger transaction volumes, international payments, and more sophisticated financial activities. As a result, banks must conduct deeper risk assessments before approving the relationship.
This part of the onboarding process usually involves understanding the company's industry and how it's handling its money. Banks also look at where the company operates and where its funds come from. These are additional checks that slow down the overall corporate onboarding process.
Higher expectations from banks
Considering the nature of corporate finance, clients typically demand a much higher level of accuracy and speed. A small delay from the bank's side can mean non-payment for a supplier, which can spiral into monetary loss.
Banks can't afford such service disruptions because a corporation will immediately decide to move to a different bank that can actually meet their requirements.
However, at the same time, banks can't just skip compliance or risk assessments to speed up the process. They have to balance the scales to make both sides happy. That's what makes corporate banking onboarding one of the most challenging customer journeys to manage.
Technology helps but it won't automatically fix your broken onboarding process on its own. It'll just widen your service gaps and move problems downstream faster. So before picking any platform solution, you need to be crystal clear about what actually needs fixing. The answer shapes every tool decision after it.
Automation and document verification - manual data collection and reviews are the biggest time sink in most digital onboarding processes in banking.
Let automation tools handle that job. They automatically verify government-issued IDs and cross-reference documents against compliance requirements to flag any problems without involving an agent. Something that may take a day gets cut down to just minutes or even seconds.
Integrations - connecting all your data sources together means the system can pull whatever it needs within seconds. Contact information updated in one system automatically updates in another. You don't have to retype data between systems or force customers to populate fields with information your bank already has.
The same logic applies to external banking use as well. A well-designed system can pull income statements, for example, from third-party sources without having someone call the office.
Perpetual KYC - you'd know that traditional KYC runs on a fixed schedule. You have teams that review every client periodically regardless of whether anything has changed.
Perpetual KYC flips that logic. The system continuously monitors all clients and triggers reviews as soon as something changes in customer data. That firstly helps the bank eliminate the cost of manual reviews. It also optimizes your resource management as you can concentrate those manual efforts elsewhere.
Decision engines - this is the main selling point of automated onboarding processes. You have a system that uses a set of predefined rules to efficiently collect data during signup. It then processes all of that without a human in the loop.
Your risk team only gets involved if the decision engine flags something that's outside normal parameters. Hence, you always have a single view of every applicant instead of multiple reports for each data source.
As a rule of thumb, always pick the tool or solution that solves your actual bottleneck. Opting for the one with the most features or best reviews for corporate banking is just asking for trouble.
Most banks are so fixated on getting customers through the account-opening process that they fail to notice where they're losing them afterward. What happens after an application is submitted is just as important as what happens before it. The moment someone has to ask about their application's status is the moment your digital onboarding has broken down.
That "fracture" exists because most banking systems operate in isolation. So each customer interaction is treated as a standalone event rather than part of the same journey.
WestCX helps banks connect those disconnected moments into a single, continuous flow. Every interaction feeds into the next one, carrying forward context, intent, and progress so that the customer never has to start their journey from scratch.
WestCX Orchestrate unifies and automates the entire onboarding journey across voice, SMS, email, chat, and other digital channels.
For banks, that same orchestration means pulling (and pushing) information as the journey evolves without involving any human staff. The system automatically determines their next best course of action.
A customer who pauses an application automatically receives a reminder through their preferred channel. Someone waiting for verification is proactively updated without having to contact the office. New account holders can continue the same journey with activation reminders, feature or product education, and other timely onboarding communications to keep customers moving forward.
At no point does a customer feel alone or confused. Our orchestration solution makes sure of that, building every interaction on the last one to create a more consistent experience while reducing the manual effort required from onboarding and support teams.
That combination of journey orchestration, multichannel engagement, and automated outreach helps banks improve their completion and activation rates. But the experience doesn’t stop there. WestCX banking partners typically see a 40% reduction in inbound calls and a 62% routine call containment rate to save millions in operational costs every year.
Ready to create onboarding experiences that customers actually complete? Book a demo right now to see how WestCX Orchestrate helps banks build stronger customer relationships from the very beginning.