Best Practices for Digital Customer Onboarding in the Financial Sector

Freedom Financial: Choosing the right digital onboarding platform

When you phone a client or prospect, you are just a voice on the phone. Without seeing someone’s face, building trust can be hard, especially when discussing complicated financial matters. Digital onboarding in banking is no longer about collecting information and dropping it into a spreadsheet. It is about building transparent and engaging relationships from your very first customer interaction.

Modern digital onboarding platforms are now part of the solution. Freedom Financial’s advisors can now walk clients through presentations and complicated forms in real time with cobrowsing. By remotely guiding clients through presentations, agents clearly explained the process while maintaining control of the experience.

The result? Higher conversion rates and a smoother onboarding journey.

Why did this approach work? Trust is difficult to establish over voice alone. But when clients can see:

• The advisor’s credentials
• Clear financial outcomes (such as potential savings)
• Social proof from other customers

With cobrowsing the digital onboarding process becomes more transparent and credible. This is one of the most important benefits of digital onboarding; it builds trust faster and reduces hesitation at critical decision points.

Kofax: Modernizing your client onboarding strategy

Kofax is a digital service provider for customer onboarding. They discuss how in banking the need for quick and easy onboarding is essential. “It’s important for your customers to see onboarding as a single process, no matter how many channels they use. To avoid losing customers, your onboarding strategy must offer leading-edge experiences.”

A strong digital onboarding platform should deliver a unified experience, ensuring that customers don’t feel like they’re restarting the process every time they switch devices or channels.

According to Kofax, modern digital onboarding practices should include:

• Streamlined processes which remove unnecessary steps, simplifies data collection and creates a more user-friendly experience.
• Use automation to handle document processing, data extraction and workflows.
• Enable customers to self-service by completing steps independent of agent support.
• Enable an omni-channel experience across mobile, desktop, and in-branch interactions.
• Keep customers informed through a transparent onboarding journey to reduce uncertainty.

Accenture and KPMG: Digital customer onboarding strategy

Many financial institutions still struggle with customer onboarding that is fragmented, manual and not aligned with the modern customer’s expectations. Both KPMG and Accenture have moved to a digital-first customer onboarding strategy.

Key takeaways and best practices include:

• Treat customer onboarding as a strategic function, not a backend office process. Many financial firms and banks fail to fully leverage technology to address onboarding challenges.
• An effective onboarding strategy should respect the expectations of all parties involved in setting up the new wealth management relationship.
• Leverage automation and move away from human-dependent processes to enable faster onboarding while creating clear audit trails for regulatory oversight.
• Focus on the first 90-120 days of the relationship, it sets expectations, builds trust and lays foundations for long-term relationships.
• Design onboarding around the customer experience to ensure that the process is transparent, efficient and easy to navigate from the outset.

Successful digital onboarding in financial services demands a fully rethought, client-centric journey powered by automation, integration, and real-time engagement.

Cognizant: Client-first digital onboarding

With Cognizant, effective digital onboarding in banking isn’t just about digitising forms, it is about putting the client at the center of the experience. The most successful institutions recognise that understanding customers’ needs and expectations is essential for long-term success. Rather than focusing on internal procedures Cognizant focuses on the customer experience at every step of the journey.

Key takeaways and best practices:

• Client onboarding should be designed around how clients expect to engage (intuitively, quickly, and with minimal effort) not just how the organisation prefers to work.
• A modern digital onboarding platform must reduce complexity while enhancing clarity and transparency for clients.
• As banks adapt to regulatory trends and shifting business models, the ability to understand and treat clients well from the outset becomes a competitive advantage.
• Client onboarding sets the tone for the entire relationship; making it crucial not just for compliance, but for customer satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value.

Client Wise: Setting clear customer expectations

A key part of any digital onboarding strategy (especially in digital onboarding in banking and financial services) is setting clear expectations early in the client journey. According to Ray Sclafani, founder of Client Wise, a strong onboarding process doesn’t just collect information; it creates a replicable, high‑quality client experience that builds trust, clarifies roles, and aligns both parties from day one.

Key takeaways and best practices:

• Sending a pre‑meeting welcome message with what will happen, what documents are needed, and what clients can expect helps avoid confusion and demonstrates professionalism from the start.
• Breaking the onboarding cycle into stages (such as pre‑meeting, initial meeting, follow‑ups, and longer‑term touchpoints) gives clients a clear view of the journey ahead and reduces uncertainty.
• Clients respond well to predictable timelines. For example, outlining what happens at one week, one month, and six months after onboarding helps manage expectations and reinforces your commitment to ongoing support.
• Immediate actions following initial meetings (thank you notes, meeting summaries, and check‑in calls) reinforce that you are delivering on promises and prioritising their experience.

Pitney Bowes: Know what the customer wants

When it comes to onboarding, Pitney Bowes understands that winning customers is only half the battle — keeping them is where the real value lies. Their Next Generation Customer Onboarding research shows that financial institutions can gain a competitive edge by building relationships that truly feel personal and purposeful. The logic is straightforward: customers want to feel known and valued, and when you deliver on that, you increase retention and open doors for meaningful cross‑sell and up‑sell opportunities.

‘’An effective customer onboarding strategy is crucial to gain an edge over the competition, and in both the minds and hearts of customers. It is a fairly simple formula — customers want to feel known and wanted by their financial institutions, while financial institutions want to know their customers to increase effectiveness, retention, and promote cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.’’

In short, it’s not enough for customers to use your services — they need to feel understood and appreciated. And when they do, they stick around longer, refer others, and become your best advocates.