AI Boosts Onboarding Experience for Commercial Treasury Clients

As enterprises and treasurers integrate with banks to digitize anti-money laundering and know your customer processes, the onboarding process might typically be thought of as the initial moments of interaction.

But Jason Marason, vice president of innovation at EvonSys, told PYMNTS that for banks, the lifecycle and maintenance of the corporate client relationships extends beyond simply getting up and running with a bank’s platform. Banks’ clients are going to change addresses, add new signers onto accounts or engage with new products and services.

“In talking about commercial banking treasury clients, we’re using the onboarding term fairly broadly, and we think about it as anything that impacts the customer entity,” he told PYMNTS.

The Challenges

Typically, there have been challenges in creating and fostering a seamless onboarding experience because of the high number of touchpoints that exist. These touchpoints are document- and data-intensive.

Although things have moved toward digital conduits, there are still PDFs and snapshots in the mix, and those submissions need to be manually processed. EvonSys, which offers a process mining tool to banking clients, has often found that there can be dozens of “variants” of processes running across global operations, sometimes even half a dozen within the same service center, Marason said.

“In a commercial scenario, you might spend weeks onboarding with a bank — and then you’re live, and the first thing they’re doing is asking you for repeat documentation that’s going to be used for entitlements on systems, as opposed to ID verification,” he said. “… There can be a lot of frustration.”

For forward-thinking banks, it’s critical to understand and design onboarding workflows with insight into the internal processes that can be fine-tuned, eliminating redundancies, he said.

At the same time, understanding the client-facing experience and removing frictions go a long way toward alleviating those frustrations. For banks, there can be a positive ripple effect, as up to 20% of calls that flood into call centers are generated by questions about what’s happened (or hasn’t happened) with onboarding — where the documents are, who has them, what happens next, Marason said.

“Coming at [onboarding] from both an inside and outside view,” he said of banks, “you’ll implement a scope and a footprint, but certain pieces of that scope will give you value — and highlight where automation is going to help.”

“[At EvonSys], we talk to treasurers on the corporate side who say that when they have a business strategy, what’s important to them is immediacy,” he said. “They need those banking products, and they want to execute.”

EvonSys has been bringing into its corporate fold business architects who are actual practitioners in onboarding and have worked at banks themselves — while building out EvonSys’s advisory practice.

The Role of AI and Other Technologies

Advancements in generative artificial intelligence and optical character recognition have helped remove friction from various processes — particularly the high touchpoints of documentation — while ensuring compliance with various regulations.

“GenAI has offered opportunities to introduce automation into these flows,” he said, adding that a proactive approach to automation involves looking at what a human actually “does” when they interact with a document and taking some of the steps out of the equation.

“The efforts are there to digitize the document process and the rules that drive those processes,” he said. “There’s a long way to go, but there’s a lot of opportunity.”

As Marason told PYMNTS, the trick is “to stay at the leading edge of technology for the sake of the business — and not for the sake of the technology itself … and to do it in an intelligent way.”

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