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Digitized Customer Onboarding and Straight-Through Processing: A Game-Changer for Relationship Managers

In a bid to streamline their operations and improve efficiency, banks in Asia are exploring digitized customer onboarding and straight-through processing (STP) to reduce the time spent by relationship managers (RMs) on non-advisory activities. However, this goal may be hindered by the prevalence of legacy platforms and manual data processing.

Time-Saving Potential

According to a recent report by McKinsey, RMs in Asia spend an average of 60-70% of their time on non-advisory activities due to the lack of unified platforms and high degree of manual data processing. This could change with the adoption of digitized customer onboarding and STP, which would enable RMs to focus more on advisory services.

Key Initiatives

To achieve this, banks may need to:

• Invest in performance management tracking for RMs, providing full visibility and transparency on key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Create capability- building modules for RMs, offering access to investment research content, macro themes, and soft-skills training such as communication.

Challenges Ahead

However, firms will need to perform proper due diligence to understand what can be built within their organization while leveraging existing platforms and systems, and what can be outsourced to a vendor in a build, operate, and transfer approach.

Banks Must Also Focus on Talent Development

The limited talent pool for building a private banking business is another significant challenge facing banks in Vietnam. To overcome this, banks need to:

• Be focused in their talent strategies, finding the correct talent while constantly addressing upskilling and retention of incumbent staff.
• Partner with prestigious institutions to co-develop certification programs, enhancing credibility and creating a differentiated value proposition for attracting talent.

Building a “Wealth Academy”

Banks can also build a “wealth academy” that brings in long-term benefits with a two-track approach:

• Defining a clear career progression path for employees.
• Establishing an institutionalized training capability to attract and retain talent.

Ecosystem of Partnerships Crucial

Banks must also be pragmatic about what can be done within their existing ecosystem and what needs to be extended beyond to third-party partnerships for quick scale-up. A targeted set of partners, such as lifestyle service providers, hotels, and airlines, could play an important role in customer acquisition.

Insurers Also Have a Chance to Succeed

In the affluent wealth space, insurers have an equal opportunity to succeed by:

• Strengthening their core product capabilities across unit-liked and universal life insurance product lines that cater to affluent and high net worth individual (HNWI) customer needs.
• Simplifying these solutions for the salesforce, enabling them to take them to their existing customer base and create new revenue streams.

Data-Driven Approach

By leveraging data-driven, personalization-at-scale capabilities, institutions can drive:

• Customer acquisition and engagement.
• Cross-sell.
• Supply critical data to advance marketing excellence.

Conclusion

While digitized customer onboarding and STP hold great promise for improving efficiency and reducing the time spent by RMs on non-advisory activities, banks in Asia must also focus on talent development, building an ecosystem of partnerships, and leveraging technology to drive growth. Insurers too have a chance to succeed by strengthening their core product capabilities and simplifying them for the salesforce. As the wealth management space continues to evolve, institutions that adapt quickly and effectively will be best positioned to capitalize on new opportunities.