Coining a Winning Customer Onboarding Journey at a Branch Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2024

Underlying Problem Definition: Customer onboarding, traditionally a time-consuming process for opening new accounts and other services, posed significant challenges due to the extensive information required from customers and the stringent regulatory and due diligence requirements from banks.

This gave rise to the need for designing a concept, idea & a solution that could address the many challenges faced when onboarding a customer into the Bank.

Concept & Innovation: The focus was mainly towards onboarding Customers for the "very first" time to the Bank (new to the Bank) through a Branch network & while also bringing about a similar experience when opening accounts for existing customers.

At present the country's Digital & Computer literacy rates are around 60% & 40% respectively and in the rural & estate sectors it's down to 40% & 20% respectively. This emphasizes the need to onboard and open accounts at Branches with an innovative solution that could address the underlying problem.

Towards implementing a solution to address this key area, HNB partnered with a software development company to introduce 'Lime,' a revolutionary fin-tech solution aimed at streamlining Technology, Internal Standard Operating Procedure, External Process & Customer/Staff Experience. This initiative not only sought to foster growth, productivity, and innovation within the institution but also positioned HNB at the forefront of implementing such solutions in the banking industry, later followed by other banks

The integration of chat-based like workflow solution (LiME) through Finacle API suite marked a significant milestone in HNB's digital transformation journey, reducing the onboarding time from 25-30 minutes to below seven minutes. The platform's intelligent user interface and modern Software as a Service (SAAS) model not only contributed to operational efficiency but also proved cost-effective.

In addition to the basic onboarding activities, bank has been able to provide various other value adding functionalities within a single onboarding workflow. The entire implementation has been orchestrated through the API services available through the state-of-the-art Finacle Core Banking Systems by Infosys.

Reasons & Objective: As part of the solution, Bank was to achieve the following objectives, a) Reduce Customer onboarding time from 40mins to under 10mins b) Paperless & Digital experience to the Customer c) Reduce Operational overheads. d) Improved experience of the use of Finacle for staff

State of Competition: Out of the six major deliveries, Bank has been able to roll out three of the key workflows to the Branches.

Departments Involved: 1. Operations Team 2. Information Technology Team & CISO Team 3. Customer Experience Team 4. Selected Branch Users 5. Third Party Solution Partner 6. Compliance & Audit Team

Results thus far: 1. Improved TAT 2. Customer & Staff satisfaction 3. Minimal errors. 4. Reduce Fee base income leakages/Operation losses 5. Minimal training required to the staff to onboard a customer. 6. Gradual reduction of Paper /Customer filling applications.