Photo Jacqueline Wilde © Kyndryl Alps
By Jacqueline Wild, Vice President and General Manager of Kyndryl Alps
Every year, banks around the world invest billions to acquire new clients. Yet many prospects fail at the very first formal step in the client relationship: onboarding. According to studies¹, acquiring new customers is roughly five times more expensive than retaining existing ones. The fact that 38% of potential clients abandon the onboarding process as soon as it becomes too lengthy weighs heavily in the balance.² Banks therefore lose revenue before a commercial relationship has even been established.
Onboarding is caught between increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, high operating costs and rising client expectations. The requirements linked to “Know Your Customer” (KYC), “Customer Due Diligence” (CDD) and “Enhanced Due Diligence” (EDD) guidelines must be met, while clients expect fast, digital and seamless processes. Yet in many institutions, the reality remains dominated by manual workflows. Data must be entered repeatedly, approvals take days or even weeks, and a significant share of operational teams is absorbed by control procedures that are difficult to scale. At the same time, supervisory demands are intensifying: in 2024, global penalties for anti-money-laundering violations amounted to around 4.6 billion US dollars³ — a clear sign of the now high cost of insufficient transparency.
In a market where digital providers can open an account in just minutes, traditional banks must rethink their onboarding processes if they wish to remain competitive. Slow or fragmented processes not only frustrate customers, but also delay revenue generation, add to operational workloads and can undermine trust in the brand before the relationship has even begun. First impressions matter: they shape loyalty, trust and, ultimately, economic success. That is why many institutions are now looking beyond conventional automation towards approaches that improve speed, consistency and transparency throughout the onboarding journey.
Against this backdrop, AI agents are becoming increasingly important. As specialised software agents, they autonomously carry out the various steps in the process, collaborate with one another and document their decisions transparently. Rather than entering data manually, AI agents perform tasks such as searches in official registers or with intelligence agencies, cross-check information across different systems and immediately identify suspicious patterns. Other agents assess risks in real time. The result is a fully integrated end-to-end process that automates repetitive tasks, reliably detects irregularities and supports auditable decision-making — with human oversight where necessary.
In new-client onboarding, AI can deliver genuine added value by helping banks make decisions more quickly, more consistently and on a stronger footing, while also enabling them to design processes that are traceable, auditable and capable of protecting sensitive client data.
The benefits of these systems are clear in hard numbers: error rates fall, corrections are reduced and processes are significantly accelerated. An onboarding procedure that previously took weeks can be shortened to a few days, or even a few hours. This has a direct impact on revenue, as new clients can be integrated into the commercial relationship more quickly. At the same time, thorough documentation and consistent risk assessment make fraud detection more effective. For many institutions, the effect on key performance indicators such as the cost-to-income ratio or ROTE (return on tangible equity) is particularly relevant, as these metrics can be materially improved through more efficient and more stable processes.⁴
For many executive teams, this fundamentally changes the basis for decision-making. Those who hesitate expose themselves to operational weaknesses, rising regulatory risks and customer attrition — and therefore, in the long term, to missed growth opportunities in an increasingly competitive market. The question is therefore no longer whether a modern onboarding process is needed, but how quickly a bank is prepared to implement one. Institutions that act early can set new standards, strengthen trust and secure a measurable competitive advantage.
[1] https://www.deloitte.com/ch/de/Industries/financial-services/research/cx-maturity-banking-study.html
[3] https://thefinancialcrimenews.com/bank-fi-aml-sanctions-fines-penalties-in-the-21st-century/
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