What Is a Customer Onboarding Program in the AML landscape?
The Customer Onboarding Program is an essential step in preventing the risk of conducting business with a client that may be involved in financial crime. It is also a critical step to make a powerful impression on new buyers.
It is one of the most fundamental, yet important steps in the Anti-money laundering efforts before conducting a business relationship with a new customer.
In the world of compliance, a comprehensive customer onboarding process involves detecting clients that may be engaged in criminal activities.
It also provides the client with information and instructions regarding a firm’s product and services.
According to a study, if a firm puts effort in providing a good customer onboarding process by providing onboarding contents.
Also properly educating them regarding the product, it usually results in 86% of clients staying loyal to the organization.
However, very few firms are investing in devising a strong Customer Onboarding Program.
And those who provide support to their customers throughout their client relationships, end up reaping long term profits. Most businesses work hard to become the leading solution providers in the market.
But only firms that provide customer support even when the client has made the purchase, ends up gaining a loyal customer base and long term business profits.
Therefore, a firm must have customer onboarding materials readily available for the clients.
Challenges in Customer Onboarding For a Financial Firm:
In the anti money laundering landscape, the customer onboarding process comes with its own set of challenges.
To meet those challenges, Onboarding in AML is required to proceed with customer due diligence (CDD) and Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures helps mitigate the risks linked with conducting business with clients with criminal background.
These compliance protocols help verify the information provided by the client.
Some of the challenges while onboarding a new customer in the AML compliance world includes:
Complex Onboarding Processes:
Generally, traditional onboarding operations are long, arduous, and complex which results in dissatisfaction by new customers and eventually dropping of the product.
Manual Operations:
Manually conducting Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations are prone to operational delays, inefficiencies and errors.
Anti-Money Laundering Compliance:
Complying with all the financial regulations and making sure to keep up with all regulatory guidelines in itself is massively multiplex.
Data Privacy & Security: Privacy of customers data and making sure it is transmitted and processed safely and securely is essential is building customer’s trust and compliance of data protection guidelines.
For the financial firms, onboarding in AML involves employing a risk assessment system to risk score the potential clients.
Avoid the risks of getting entangled in the financial scandals of a prospective client.
Some Essential Steps In Customer Onboarding
For a financial firm, some essential steps for customer onboarding involves:
Verification of Provided Documents: This basic step involves collecting the required identity documents and verifying their authenticity to avoid any financial fraud.
Performing Background Checks: This step involves conducting a thorough background check to confirm the beneficial ownerships of clients and making sure they were not involved in any criminal activity before.
This step also involves identifying politically exposed persons and making sure the prospective customer is not sanctioned. By any regulatory authority and government organization.
Analyzing the Risk Score: This step involves analyzing the risk score of potential clients by going through their risk profile.
This step will determine whether to put a customer under ongoing AML screening.
Customer onboarding in the financial firms implies analyzing massive scale of CDD/KYC data.
This verified data helps in ongoing Anti-money laundering transactions and compliance. Measures that are applicable in the entire relationship with a customer.
Automation of onboarding helps the compliance officers to effectively manage the customers data.
It implies that customers data will be readily available. It is effectively organized when needed in cases of suspicious activity reports (SARs).
In later stages of probes conducted by the law enforcement agencies and regulatory authorities.
Automating the process of customer onboarding is the best and safest approach for data storage.
Data is stored in the central repository of information. Everyone has access to it and can be easily accessed in times of SAR procedures.
Customer onboarding softwares helps stay compliant with Anti money laundering regulations and is an essential part of customer service.
It also aids in measuring the firm’s growth, their objectives and helps them in keeping up with updates in the regulatory landscape.
Why Compliance with AML necessary while onboarding new customers?
Compliance with anti-money laundering regulations while onboarding a new customer helps financial firms.
In staying away from the criminal activities of their clients. Save them from getting entangled in the financial scandal of their clients.
Therefore, investing in automated onboarding tools helps a finance business to avoid the plague of reputation damage and costly lawsuits by regulatory bodies.
