In a landscape with growing competition and higher customer expectations, fintech providers and traditional banks have a unique opportunity to work together to enhance customer experiences — starting with fintech client onboarding. The desire to innovate and increasing M&A activity are two big drivers of these partnerships, according to a recent report from VISA, What Lies Ahead for Bank and Fintech Partnerships, which noted that the world’s largest bank, JP Morgan Chase, has acquired more than 30 fintech providers in just the past few years.
In addition to forging formal partnerships, banks are also outsourcing some core capabilities like digital payments vendor management to fintech vendors.
When it comes to banks leveraging modern fintech products, there are opportunities, especially with onboarding to enhance this process. A well-structured, transparent onboarding process builds trust, ensures regulatory compliance, and enables banks to offer fintech solutions with confidence. However, many fintech providers face significant challenges that can hinder the effectiveness of their onboarding processes, potentially jeopardizing their partnerships with banks.
Common Challenges in Fintech Client Onboarding
One of the most pervasive challenges in fintech client onboarding is the disjointed experience customers often face. With multiple teams interacting with clients simultaneously—using disparate tools like Excel, Box, and secure email—there’s a high risk of miscommunication and lack of transparency. Clients are left with limited visibility into their onboarding progress, which can erode trust and lead to frustration.
Professional services automation tools, while useful, often fall short of providing the necessary visibility into task assignments, workloads, and capacity. This limitation can result in a “pointing a technical finger rather than an actual one” scenario, where issues are passed between teams without clear accountability. This lack of clarity hampers efficiency and slows down the onboarding process.
Many fintech providers also struggle with centralized data collection, staging, and management. The absence of a centralized system makes it easy for important data to get lost, leading to delays and errors that can frustrate both the fintech provider and the bank.
As fintech providers expand their client base, the complexity of managing multiple tools, teams, and processes becomes more apparent. Without a scalable system, fintech teams and their clients often experience delays launching new solutions, which can strain the partnership before it begins.
The Impact on Business
These challenges in fintech client onboarding have a direct impact on the business outcomes of fintech providers. Gaps between sales and onboarding processes delay service delivery, directly impacting revenue recognition. The lack of centralized data management further complicates the process of gathering and validating data during onboarding. In addition to creating delays, it can be difficult for them to comply with banks’ stringent regulatory requirements. The VISA report cited regulatory issues among the top three challenges for fintech providers, in addition to achieving scale, gaining visibility, and funding their ventures.
Inefficient onboarding processes also make it difficult for product teams to monitor project status and track responsibilities in real-time. This increases overhead costs as client success managers spend more time and resources reviewing tasks and timelines instead of interacting with their clients.
Clients expect real-time insight into the status of their implementations. When fintech providers fail to offer this transparency, client engagement drops, and accountability suffers. Without clear visibility, clients may become disengaged, leading to a weakened relationship and potential churn.
Setting the Foundation for Stronger Partnerships
Banks can offer fintech providers the capital and established customer bases they desperately need, while fintechs can help banks offer a greater variety of innovative solutions in a heavily regulated industry.
Fintech providers seeking to work with banks can demonstrate their expertise and growth potential with scalable, tech-enabled client onboarding processes.
Client onboarding software provides a single source of truth for data management, task assignments, and client communications. This reduces the risk of data loss while enhancing transparency and improving process efficiency.
These solutions offer the potential to automate many manual onboarding tasks, such as notifying team members when a client has submitted documents so they can take the next steps. Similar to the dashboards fintech platforms offer their own clients, the best onboarding solutions also offer advanced analytics that can offer insights such as actual times to complete tasks compared to estimated times, enabling providers to continually refine their onboarding processes for better outcomes. They include built-in case management that makes it easy for clients to submit requests, see the status of those requests and receive timely responses.
They enable fintechs to scale onboarding processes effectively while keeping clients engaged.
Elevate Your Fintech Partnerships with Setuply
Client onboarding is a cornerstone of success for fintech solution providers. As the industry evolves, so do the demands and expectations of clients. The ability to effectively onboard clients and strike a balance between scalability and personalization is no longer a luxury—it's a necessity.
Setuply is here to help you meet these challenges head-on. Our comprehensive automation platform equips fintech providers with the tools needed to streamline client onboarding, enhance client engagement, and maintain compliance. With Setuply, you're not just managing onboarding; you're transforming it into a strategic advantage that fuels growth and strengthens partnerships with banks.
Ready to elevate your onboarding process? Schedule a demo today!