Approach to improving the New Account Opening process
The New Account Opening process in many financial services organizations is inefficient, inaccurate, highly manual and often largely paper-based.
The business typically has a set of goals (in italics) that drive requirements to improve the new account opening process:
The eventual aim for many organizations is to provide straight-through processing (STP), enabled by automation, integrated exchange of data with business partners and integrated backoffice systems. This represents the requirement that the majority of applications be handled automatically from the point of application through to fulfillment, reserving the use of human interaction for higher value tasks such as customer services and complex exception handling.
Attaining complete STP is complex and requires a significant amount of technology, process and organizational change. A pragmatic approach is required to enable organizations to deliver incremental improvements to the process and the technology over time. This in turn enables them to demonstrate significant benefits by progressively meeting more of the business goals along the way. The eventual STP milestone can be broken down into achievable steps, with measurable benefits being demonstrated along the way.
The aim of these pages is to assist highlight how the New Account Opening process works now and provide pragmatic suggestions about how it can be improved over several stages.
To start, here is a diagram that shows how the New Account Opening process looks at a high level, regardless of the technology (or lack of it). This is the framework for the discussions, and all items will lead back to this.
The business typically has a set of goals (in italics) that drive requirements to improve the new account opening process:
- Increase the speed that a customer account can be set up
- Improving customer perception
- Reducing the rate of customers abandoning the process
- Increase the efficiency of the process
- Enabling the process to scale
- Reducing the cost to set up customer accounts
- Increasing the accuracy of information captured
- Ensuring that errors are not introduced downstream in the customer relationship
- Prevent compliance issues, lawsuits and damage to brand
The eventual aim for many organizations is to provide straight-through processing (STP), enabled by automation, integrated exchange of data with business partners and integrated backoffice systems. This represents the requirement that the majority of applications be handled automatically from the point of application through to fulfillment, reserving the use of human interaction for higher value tasks such as customer services and complex exception handling.
Attaining complete STP is complex and requires a significant amount of technology, process and organizational change. A pragmatic approach is required to enable organizations to deliver incremental improvements to the process and the technology over time. This in turn enables them to demonstrate significant benefits by progressively meeting more of the business goals along the way. The eventual STP milestone can be broken down into achievable steps, with measurable benefits being demonstrated along the way.
The aim of these pages is to assist highlight how the New Account Opening process works now and provide pragmatic suggestions about how it can be improved over several stages.
To start, here is a diagram that shows how the New Account Opening process looks at a high level, regardless of the technology (or lack of it). This is the framework for the discussions, and all items will lead back to this.
posted by Phil Ayres at
9:15 AM
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