Brittany Garland, Executive Director at IHS Markit discusses the most pressing challenges related to onboarding and the most efficient ways to automating and streamlining the process.

Why is onboarding such a problem?
Onboarding is such a problem in the industry because there's no transparency around the requirements that are needed from clients’ up front for their data and documentation. Furthermore, once those requirements have been provided, there's no transparency into the process once the account has been submitted, for example, clients are constantly wondering, has my account passed the KYC approval process? Have I submitted enough information for credit checks? Have I appropriately submitted my legal documentation for review? That is why there's such a problem and a manual process related to onboarding.

What's causing the process to be so manual / take 40 days?
The process is so manual right now, because there is no transparency of the data and documentation requirements upfront. What this is leading to is a need for clients to manually communicate over email, phone calls or Excel files to understand what they need to provide in order to pass various due diligence processes. Furthermore, once the data has been submitted, they're still manually following up over emails or phone calls to understand where the account is within the process. Due to a lack of transparency in where the hold ups are, there's no visibility into how this problem can be solved right now, which is what we're looking to solve.

What is the opportunity for the Financial Market?
The opportunity for financial markets is to move to a place where we are providing an institutional digital identity during the account opening process. Furthermore, by understanding the requirements across institutions, we can start to determine this standardized onboarding set of requirements that are needed and also provide visibility into different institutions bespoke requirements. We are committed to building out onboarding solutions to continue to tackle challenges related to client onboarding over the course of time.

Get in touch to learn more: sales@ihsmarkit.com or visit our Onboarding Accelerator homepage.