Client & Customer Onboarding

7 Customer Onboarding Best Practices You Should Adopt This Year

Customers in the banking space want user-friendly and intuitive onboarding experiences, yet this isn't often what they get. Here are some best practices you can adopt this year.


Having to enter the same information multiple times. Going through a lengthy approval process to create a new account. Getting email reminders for documents already submitted. Having limited to zero visibility about the status of your customer onboarding process.

Financial services customers frequently face these and many other pain points when attempting to access financial services as new customers or when existing customers try to add new services.

Customers in the retail banking space want user-friendly, easy, and intuitive digital access to financial services. Yet sadly, they often do not get what they want or need.

Don't lead customers through an onboarding process that’s slow, duplicative, and overly complex. Instead, let's look at some customer onboarding best practices you can adopt for 2023.

7 Customer Onboarding Best Practices to Incorporate This Year 

Consumers appreciate the convenience and flexibility of digital onboarding experiences, especially for millennials, with over 50% saying they would rather manage financial accounts through a digital channel or mobile app than another source. The same is true for nearly 40% of all consumers.

However, just offering digital customer onboarding applications is not enough. Consumers expect a streamlined and integrated process from start to finish, uninterrupted when they need to switch channels or pause and start later.

By implementing these seven best practices, financial institutions can provide the best customer onboarding experience.

1. Keep Security Your Top Priority   

With cybercrimes occurring once every 39 seconds, you need to get data out of email and into a customer portal that will keep data secure. Typical client onboarding can mean collecting up to 100 client documents and information for 150 data fields. Financial service providers should use centralized databases to automatically upload existing documentation and prepopulated templates to streamline this effort. 

2. Remove Barriers for Customers     

An intuitive application isn't difficult for customers to navigate or fill in. Customers should feel that your application is easy to access and use from a practical process standpoint and even their understanding of how the platform functions.

Ease of use is also essential across channels. The platform allow customers to seamlessly begin and end the onboarding process across applications. For example, if your customer begins the onboarding process on their smartphone, they should be able to complete it later on a laptop or computer.

3. Be Mobile-Friendly

Along with functioning across channels, your onboarding process platform should be mobile-friendly. The customer experience should be comfortable even on the small screen of a smartphone.

A good mobile application experience limits the number of fields on each page and avoids complex drop-downs and scrolling of fields. Applications should be as easy to fill out on mobile devices as they are on desktop. 

4. Enable Self-Service Options  

Research shows that most corporate clients prefer a self-service portal that serves as a central point of contact with their financial service provider. To do this effectively, the portal needs an intelligent, personalized customer onboarding interface that only asks for information relevant to that customer.

Financial institutions that equip client portals with several essential features — automated document upload, status tracking, electronic signatures, multi-factor biometric authentication, and an AI-enabled chatbot — experience a substantial boost in customer adoption of these portals.

5. Incorporate Auto-Population in all Forms

Other digital features that enable smooth customer onboarding include pre-filled data from public sources and pre-filled documents that only ask customers for approval rather than asking them to complete a separate form.

Many enterprise clients work with multiple financial services providers, so they also need the capability to access banking services directly and seamlessly from their own ecosystem or infrastructure via APIs.

6. Deliver a Consistent Experience

Some solutions can feel disconnected from the other institution's digital applications. Consumers should feel safe and confident about their financial products by sharing personal and financial information.

With a consistent design and cohesive domain experience, your customers will know that your application comes from the institution they know and trust. Customers should feel confident throughout the onboarding process.

They should feel involved and know where they are within the process at any given time. The terminology must be clear and simple to comprehend, including explanations of error messages.

The best customer onboarding solutions will offer in-line support, how-tos, or the ability to contact a live agent if the customer needs assistance.

7. Create Efficiencies for New Customers

There are numerous solutions available to streamline and expedite the customer onboarding process by eliminating unnecessary manual steps. Some cloud-based platforms allow customers to connect other accounts to pre-fill form fields, saving time and eliminating the need to upload documents such as bank statements.

Simple, Safe, and Secure Document Collection for Better Customer Onboarding

FileInvite is paving the way for frictionless interactions that enable our clients to quickly and easily collect documents as part of the customer onboarding process. By streamlining the collection of essential documents and data, your teams can focus on building stronger customer relationships, right from the get go.

To learn more and request a demo, visit FileInvite today.

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