Client Onboarding Solutions: Buy or Build?

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Many wealth management firms are scrutinizing their business processes with an eye to automation, since manual processes like client onboarding and updating are expensive, labour intensive and error prone. As a result, automating business processes has become a high priority project with many firms. For many wealth management firms, this has started a “buy versus build” discussion. Why not just have your in-house team build a business process management solution to automate your onboarding? Industry experience, solution flexibility, and faster implementation time are among the reasons to work with an experienced onboarding solution provider. The alternative can be an expensive and inflexible proprietary system which cannot keep pace with changes in the field of client onboarding.

In the current economic climate, wealth management firms are often looking for ways to cut costs. Given this situation, it seems like an obvious choice to build a client onboarding solution in house rather than partner with an outside organization. However, firms often run into a series of problems which commence with assessing the scope of the project. Often when evaluating the “build” option, the effort to automate processes like client onboarding is underestimated or the automation project scope is narrowly defined, resulting in little benefit. One of the most common failures of client onboarding automation projects is the inflexibility of the new system - a simple question, documentation or workflow update requires costly development and long delays. The result is an inflexible client onboarding system which, while it is well received on day one, quickly begins to cost the company in escalating maintenance and support dollars. Next, user frustration increases as systems cannot keep up with business strategy - negatively impacting staff productivity, performance and loyalty. The end result is an outdated system which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to maintain, and which staff hate to use.

The truth is that client onboarding is complicated. It is a core operational process for all financial services firms, involving every customer and every product. It spans multiple departments and offices, and it must meet strict compliance regulations. Client onboarding is complex, detailed and constantly evolving. For most financial services firms, it involves 300-600 questions, 5-10 workflows, 30- 150 documents and 200-300 business rules – all of which change as new products are introduced, new regulations are imposed and organizational changes occur such as mergers and acquisitions.

Using a comprehensive, pre-built client onboarding solution, you can be assured of the following benefits:

• Accelerated and improved client onboarding • The ability to extend your onboarding system to automate

any form based process, from account management and maintenance to internal process workflows.

• Advisors who are enabled to initiate and manage the client onboarding process

• Easy updates to business critical questionnaires, workflows, and business

• Visibility and transparency in the client onboarding process • An archive of client onboarding materials and interactions.

In this document, we will examine each key design goal and the significant R&D investments made by Doxim to deliver OpenAdvantage™. These investments have made OpenAdvantage™ a best-in-class client onboarding system, which cannot easily be matched in scope and flexibility by a custom build solution.

ACCELERATE AND IMPROVE QUALITY OF CLIENT ONBOARDINGOpenAdvantage™ clients expect to decrease their overall client onboarding times by 50% and report their NIGO rates to drop to almost 0%. The following research and development investments have made these benefits possible.

Client Onboarding Solutions – Buy or Build?


Key R&D Investments:

•Responsive faster client onboarding is accomplished through a streamlined question/ answer process or simple but elegant smart forms, and an intuitive user interface. OpenAdvantage™ utilizes a powerful patented framework to allow for rapid feedback to the user inside the web browser, minimizing server trips over the network as well as providing security by enforcing rules on the application server.

•Real-timeIntegration: OpenAdvantage™ was designed to enable straight through, real-time, processing of accounts. OpenAdvantage™ eases integration with other front-office and back-office systems through standard interfaces including web services and XML. OpenAdvantage™ has interfaces for several back-office systems including systems from IBM, Broadridge and Sungard. Our solution was designed to offer a complete client onboarding system including workflow, document management, and document generation. We realize that existing systems may perform some of these functions, thus OpenAdvantage™ is able via web services (or APIs) to work with third party solutions for workflow, document management, and document generation to allow organizations to unify their data architectures. OpenAdvantage™ also supports integration with third party providers for electronic signatures, and politically exposed persons checks. And, of course, OpenAdvantage™ integrates bidirectionally with CRM systems to capture and store essential client data.

•WorkflowAutomation: OpenAdvantage™ can automate and coordinate workflows that span multiple departments as well as multiple organizations (for example: clearing firms and correspondents). As well, OpenAdvantage™ can automate sophisticated parallel workflows. Today, very few firms have completely automated the client onboarding workflow.

•PersonalizedWelcome Kits: Client onboarding is a key marketing opportunity. With OpenAdvantage™, you can choose to generate a personalized welcome kit which contains dynamic documents such as a welcome letter whose contents (promotional material, legal disclosure and disclaimers) are dependent on the nature of the products specified. Automated personalized sales kits dramatically reduce the representatives need to “understand the paperwork requirements” and enable the

firm to institutionalize best practices. OpenAdvantage™ can assemble documents page by page or even line by line to tailor the materials specifically based on the client and product. The OpenAdvantage™ pagination engine ensures dynamic documents are professionally formatted.

•Sophisticated Permissioning: Advisors often rely on

their sales associates, branch administrators or even other advisors to help open new accounts quickly. The OpenAdvantage™ architecture has a sophisticated permissioning system to ensure that each user can access only the relevant information for their role such as assistants, advisors, branch managers, operations manager, and compliance manager. Permissioning also plays a key role to secure data when client onboarding spans multiple organizations (such as Broker/ Dealers and clearing firms).

INITIATE AND MANAGE THE CLIENT ONBOARDING PROCESSWhen advisors initiate and manage the client onboarding process, the result is increased business volume and improved quality. A study conducted by Moss-Adams showed that top performing Broker-Dealer firms that “initiated more transactions in the field had low NIGO rates and took less time to complete a taski”. Advisors are quick to embrace Doxim powered systems because they increase productivity, improve quality and increase their overall visibility into the process.

The key OpenAdvantage™ product features which ease advisor adoption are:

• Dynamic Questionnaires or Smart Forms: With OpenAdvantage™, opening an account is as easy as having a conversation. The intelligent system can be configured to ask only the necessary questions based on the specific client scenario such as account type, the selected product(s) and existing client information. And whether you choose simple but intelligent PDF forms or a full HTML custom questionnaire duplicate information entry is eliminated – easing advisor frustration and boosting productivity. Behind the scenes the system handles data validation and computations necessary to open the account. The goal is to have a responsive client onboarding system which is designed to reflect the way brokers work and minimizing training requirements.



• On-screen Help and Tooltips: OpenAdvantage™’s context-sensitive help and FAQ generation is built into the system to help users through the client onboarding process. These tips are displayed and automatically adjusted as the user proceeds through the client onboarding process.

• Simplified Migration and Client Transition: Bringing on new advisors often results in a scramble to transfer client assets. OpenAdvantage™ allows for partial client information in a spreadsheet exported from a handheld device or CRM package to be imported as work in progress. Advisors can then enter this missing information and generate an account agreement or immediately generate a partial agreement to fill in by hand with the client.

• VisibilityintotheclientonboardingProcess: For years, client onboarding has been perceived as a black hole to many advisors, where paperwork “goes in and then we wait”. With OpenAdvantage™, advisors have complete, real-time visibility into the approval process and workflow for their accounts.

ENABLE PROCESS UPDATES BY BUSINESS USERS In financial services, client onboarding is constantly changing – every year brings new regulations, new products and new forms. One of the most common failures of client onboarding automation projects is the inflexibility of the new system - a simple question, documentation or workflow update requires costly development and long delays.

The result is an inflexible client onboarding system which may be well received on day one, but which has maintenance and support costs which quickly escalate. User frustration increases as systems cannot keep up with business strategy - negatively impacting staff productivity, performance and loyalty.

OpenAdvantage™ enables tight alignment of business strategy and operational processes. OpenAdvantage™ is designed to enable business analysts (with proper permissions) to configure all aspects of the client onboarding process including questionnaire, business rules, workflow

and generated documents. Updating the client onboarding and updating process is as easy as 1, 2, 3: Change, Review, Deploy.

For example:

• Dynamic questionnaires are authored by business analysts – they do not require code changes or programming skills

• New questions can be added and previewed immediately, and values are stored using a logical data model or user defined fields

• Workflow can be viewed graphically allowing visualization of how accounts flow through the system

• Business rules are defined in a subset of Javascript • Document filling can be done in directly from the PDF using

Adobe Acrobat

OpenAdvantage™ allows business users to focus on what they know best within their business while allowing the system to transparently handle the complexities of web design, data storage, document generation and pagination, audit histories and permissions behind the scenes.

PROVIDE VISIBILITY, TRANSPARENCY AND A CLIENT ONBOARDING ARCHIVE•Easeand improvecompliance reporting by automating

time-consuming, manual tasks. OpenAdvantage™ improves the quality of the data captured by ensuring that required values are entered, and that required documents are tracked. OpenAdvantage™’s configurable workflow and business rules are designed to help meet compliance and regulatory obligations, and reduce liability risks.

•Produce business, compliance and audit reports – Produce comprehensive compliance and audit reports increasing the transparency of internal processes and efficiency within the organization. OpenAdvantage™ can produce more than thirty reports including business metrics, operational efficiency and portfolio supervision.




Doxim builds and delivers automated client on-boarding software, cloud-based Enterprise Content Management, and advanced document processing solutions for Financial Service Providers and their outsourcing partners. These solutions are used by thousands of clients in banking, credit unions, wealth management and investment brokerage to create, deliver and manage business critical documents and content more efficiently and cost effectively. Doxim solutions help these organizations to improve client communications, streamline document access and meet the stringent compliance requirements associated with transactional document output and delivery. Doxim is an SSAE16/CSAE 3416 compliant organization.

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•Streamline Processes with Enterprise ContentManagement(ECM)- The OpenAdvantage™ platform can be extended with Doxim ECM to enable rapid processing, fast retrieval and centralized management of massive document archives while enhancing corporate compliance practices and policies. Access to the archive can be securely shared by authorized users between clearing firms and correspondents. With BarcodeAdvantage™, paper documents are scanned, stored and organized using dynamically generated barcodes – transforming a paper trail into a rapidly accessible, centrally managed digital document archive. This can speed the client onboarding process by eliminating the need for paper forms to be couriered and processed by the clearing firm. Electronic documentation s secure and can easily be replicated to meet institutional security standards.

•Generate missing document reports – With OpenAdvantage™, you can quickly access and view a report outlining the status of documentation at any business level.

•Comprehensivelogarchiving – Log data is archived and indexed in perpetuity to meet data retention regulations.

MULTI-TENANT ENVIRONMENTS For partners seeking to extend their offerings with client onboarding, OpenAdvantage™ has the flexibility and scalability needed to be incorporated into your comprehensive financial services platform. Many organizations such as clearing firms and back-office providers want to extend their offerings with client onboarding and update capabilities. Multi-tenant capabilities are essential to enabling OpenAdvantage™ to be delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering.

Multi-tenant environments enable a single installation to simultaneously support multiple organizations. For example, OpenAdvantage™ enables a clearing firm to support multiple correspondents from a single installation. Each correspondent firm has the option of utilizing a standard or alternatively a configurable client onboarding process. Configurations are based off the master template but are maintained separately so that changes made for one correspondent are isolated and a single system can be used to serve many firms simultaneously.

Our configuration was designed for service bureau sand clearing firms as well as brokerages. Master templates can be created and be modified by correctly permissioned correspondents to add additional documents, questions, business rules, or workflows.

SUMMARYBusiness process automation projects, like client onboarding automation, are often underestimated. This can result in the creation of costly, limited custom systems which become cumbersome and dated. Today, wealth management firms are seeking client onboarding systems which will immediately lower the cost and complexity of client onboarding, and will keep pace with regulatory change and firm growth. With the investment of 150 man years of development and more than 10 years of field experience, Doxim has built a flexible and easy-to-use client onboarding platform. Don’t make the costly mistake of underestimating the complexity of client onboarding automation. Consider partnering with Doxim to allow you to go to market immediately, leverage a proven solution and lower your development costs.

i Moss Adams, “The Art of Efficiency”

Client Onboarding Solutions: Buy or Build?

Economy & Finance

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