nCino Smart Onboarding & Monitoring
Financial institutions face major challenges when onboarding commercial customers, driven by strict KYC and KYB regulations, heavy documentation requirements, and the need to assess creditworthiness—while still meeting rising customer expectations. SmartOnboard streamlines this process by bringing all required checks and case management into a single platform, reducing manual work, supporting regulatory compliance, and delivering a smoother customer experience.
How it works
SmartOnboard
KYB check
AML & Compliance
Commercial Credit Checks
eKYC Check
PEPs, Sanctions and Adverse Media
Email Validation
Document verification
Facial comparision
Key Features & Services
Know Your Business (KYB)
Verify the legitimacy and integrity of business entities to ensure compliance with regulatory standards.
Electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC)
Efficiently verify customer identities through digital processes, enhancing security and user experience.
PEPs, Sanctions & Adverse Media Checks
Conduct rigorous checks against Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), sanctions lists, and adverse media to significantly reduce risk and ensure compliance.
Email Validation
Confirm the authenticity of customer email addresses to prevent fraud and improve communication.
Identity Verification (ID&V)
Authenticate customer identities using advanced verification techniques to ensure legitimacy.
Case Management
Efficiently handle all onboarding cases in one platform, ensuring streamlined workflows and swift resolution of compliance tasks.
Market Context & Impact
in average annual spending on the onboarding process per bank
average cost per client onboarded.
of respondents state that it costs more to onboard a customer than a year ago.
a year for a bank onboarding 1,000 customers annually
daily revenue earned from a day reduction in the onboarding process for a bank earning $100M in new sales annually
of respondents state that a positive onboarding experience leads to higher lifetime revenue for a customer.
Deep Dive: Survey & Cost Analysis
Respondents - Worldwide Survey
Understanding the current and future state of onboarding across regions, asset segments, and stakeholders.
Regional Breakdown
Bank Size (Assets)
Role/Responsibility
Key Takeaways & Strategic Recommendations
Key Takeaways
Manual vs. Automated Processing
The industry exhibits a stark dichotomy: while some stages are highly automated, early-stage activities like prospecting and acquisition remain heavily manual and resource-intensive, creating significant bottlenecks.
The 49-Day Benchmark
With a global average onboarding time of 49 days, there is massive room for optimization. Markets vary wildly, highlighting the potential for standardized digital workflows to bring all regions up to speed.
Spending Volatility
Onboarding costs are increasingly unpredictable. Lower total spending is often a false economy, frequently offset by disproportionately high costs per individual client due to inefficient manual overrides and legacy friction.
Strategic Recommendations
Standardize Variability
Identify and automate the specific high-manual-effort stages that consume the majority of your onboarding timeline. Focus on building robust SLAs for steps that are historically the most frustrating for clients.
Bridge the Performance Gap
Leverage regional best practices in document handling and acquisition. Prospecting remains the single largest opportunity for automation—standardizing this stage can drastically reduce both time and cost-per-client.
What is Onboarding?
Onboarding is the critical first step in the customer lifecycle—the process of acquiring and subscribing new users while ensuring they have fast, simple access to an organization's full suite of products and services.
Onboarding is not a one-size-fits-all process. It varies significantly depending on the client, from single retail customers to complex multinational corporations. To be classified as truly digital, the journey must be completed entirely online, without requiring branch appointments or manual contract signatures.
The Problem
Current onboarding is tied to rigid features within the nCino BOS, lacking the flexibility for modern integrations.
Built on legacy technology, the existing managed package approach stifles rapid change and continuous improvement.
Limited search capabilities and inflexible data handling create friction for both bank staff and end customers.
Why are we doing this?
- Strategic Solution: Creating a long-term, scalable capability that forms part of our core messaging.
- OOTB Expectations: Large enterprise clients (like Barclays) now expect a seamless, out-of-the-box experience.
- Reduced Customization: Minimizing the need for custom PSO projects by providing a robust, standard platform.
User & Business Benefits
Short Term
- Colleague experience UI with workflow framework
- Meaningful solution ready for adoption by fall
- Stop Barclays churn
- Flexible solution to support global use cases
- Agnostic solution to data sources that come into it
- Validation of solution with customers and geographies
Long Term
- Quickly respond to regulatory change
- Drive cross sales
- FIs can downscale but stay in control
- nCino leading player in onboarding solution market
- Sell onboarding as its own solution with its own revenue stream
Who are we building for?
Customer
Goals
- • Secure a product in a timely manner
- • Visibility of what they need to do and when
- • An end-to-end digital onboarding journey
nCino Interaction
Customer Portal
Painpoints
- • Slow onboarding time
- • Lack of transparency and personalisation
- • Physical signing of documents & branch visits
Needs
Seamless experience in uploading documents and information input via mobile.
Relationship Manager
Goals
- • Visibility of end-to-end experience
- • Easy case management and handover
- • Communicate all requirements upfront
nCino Interaction
Painpoints
- • Slow onboarding time
- • Manual creation of connections
- • Inefficient handover between teams
Needs
Faster onboarding time, less data input, and meeting monthly quotas.
KYC Analyst
Goals
- • Efficient case management and accurately conduct assessments from a single platform
nCino Interaction
Painpoints
- • Manual onboarding process
- • Inefficient handover process
- • Processing eligibility of documents
Needs
Faster onboarding time with less back and forth in validating data from the RM.
Design Methodology
A rigorous approach to solving complex problems, moving from deep research to polished delivery.
Understanding the User Journey
We conducted 15+ in-depth interviews with corporate treasurers and bank relationship managers to map out the current pain points.
- Journey mapping current friction points
- Competitive benchmarking with bank managers
- Technical feasibility audit with engineering
- Data requirement consolidation
Final Deliverables
View Figma Prototype
The Result & Impact
Reduction in dropout rates
Avg. days to onboard
Positive user sentiment
"Wow, this experience is so clean & Intuitive. One of banking clients even requested an additional hour to deep dive into the future mockups beacuse we are solving some of their biggest pain points. Great work!!"
