Published: February 08, 2024
Client onboarding has become increasingly costly and time consuming for all parties as a result of ever-more complex and demanding KYC regulation. But BNP Paribas’ state-of-the-art onboarding platform – Welcome – is succeeding in bringing automation and digitisation to bear on the challenge.
The result is much-needed speed and simplicity, together with a touch of sustainability. Stéphanie Niemi, Head of Digital Onboarding for corporate, BNP Paribas, explains the design and operation of Welcome and discusses the bank’s bold ambitions for its future development.
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Waves of regulation in recent decades aimed at cracking down on financial crime, notably money laundering, have led to financial institutions (FIs) escalating their investment in technology and automation in a bid to comply with KYC rules when onboarding clients. The necessary tasks, which traditionally have been highly labour intensive and time consuming, have fuelled the search for solutions to ease the significant burden placed on organisations on both sides of the process.
In recent years corporate clients of all financial institutions have become increasingly frustrated by the costs and complexities of KYC and onboarding.
BNP Paribas is among banks at the forefront in the development of in-house digital platforms for onboarding clients. Its solution, called Welcome, is a state- of-the-art platform that aims to simplify the process by enabling the relatively effortless and paper-free collection of KYC documents, bank account opening, and e-banking subscriptions (see box 1 for additional benefits).
Niemi explains: “In recent years corporate clients of all financial institutions have become increasingly frustrated by the costs and complexities of KYC and onboarding. The fact that regulations governing them are not consistent across different countries is also a major headache.
“Corporates have also been puzzled as to why, in an era when digitisation has penetrated so successfully across many of their day-to-day treasury operations, such as payments, digital solutions have been so lacking for KYC. Welcome helps to directly address those concerns, substantially simplifying and accelerating the onboarding process by leveraging digitisation and automation.”
A single, consistent experience for treasurers, with the same requirements irrespective of country, while still respecting local regulations.
The Welcome platform provides a digital interface that enables corporate clients to facilitate the collection of all the data and documentation the bank needs for its quality control processes and KYC tasks. One of its key features is that it provides “a single, consistent experience for treasurers, with the same requirements irrespective of country, while still respecting local regulations.”
As a result, BNP Paribas’ international clients experience the same onboarding journey wherever they are in the world. And as a thank-you for embracing and leveraging Welcome, BNP Paribas plants a tree for every client sign- up – underlining the bank’s own commitment to net zero. To date, nearly 19,000 trees have been planted thanks to
Specific aspects of Welcome that help ensure onboarding is as painless and swift as possible for clients include intelligent data collection that simplifies form filling.
Launched initially in France in 2018, Welcome is available across 20 countries in total, predominantly in Europe. The bank has also started deploying the solution in two countries in APAC, with one more coming on stream in the region by the end of 2023. The aim is to add a further 15 to 20 countries to the Welcome roster by the end of 2025 and the broad objective is to deploy the solution everywhere regulation enables the bank to do so.
BNP Paribas clients leveraging Welcome in these countries can experience the following benefits:
“The platform can even pre-fill forms for the corporate client if the bank already has the information. After all, there is nothing more annoying for busy treasurers than to be asked for the same information umpteen times,” says Niemi.
Of course, there is only so much that can be done to remove friction from the KYC process while keeping it robust. Niemi comments: “Trying to take short cuts with customer verification just for the sake of speed can lead to many more red flags being generated. They would all need investigating and that itself can be very time consuming and costly, thus defeating the purpose of the exercise.
“As a bank, we want the best and quickest solution possible for our clients, but it is critical we respect the regulations. And that means striking a balance between the user experience and complying fully with the regulatory requirements. Therefore, the Welcome platform has been designed to automate and digitise the KYC process as much as possible while balancing the needs of all parties.”
Our mission was to deliver a simple, user-friendly solution and clients do feel we are achieving that.
Nevertheless, the bank is continually exploring new ways of accelerating the process and removing any remaining pain points. “One major gain made through Welcome has been the effectiveness with which we collect, manage, and manipulate data. In general, data quality is very good, with clients supplying exactly what we have requested, so we avoid those back-and-forth emails that are such a pain for everybody. This is an encouraging basis from which to look at further optimisation of the platform, such as new channels for supplying information to the bank.”
BNP Paribas also continues to build on Welcome’s success with further integration of the platform with the bank’s wider KYC ecosystem. Niemi elaborates: “We are interfacing Welcome progressively with all the bank’s tools via APIs. That means that any relevant data or the documents available in the tools can also be leveraged for Welcome and helps avoid those annoying repeat data requests being sent to clients. This is a very important capability for us to develop, not least because it can really impact client satisfaction.”
Niemi says that, to date, feedback gathered from Welcome clients shows that the platform is “highly appreciated” by them. Surveys of newly onboarded clients have returned highly encouraging results so far, with the bank calculating from the feedback a Net Promoter Score (NPS), a business metric used to gauge customer loyalty, satisfaction and enthusiasm, of +48 for Welcome since the beginning of this year.
“That is a very positive NPS result. It is based on client responses to a survey taken by clients once their case has been finalised and all the KYC documents validated. It is a very revealing score as it consolidates feedback from all onboarding journeys made by clients across all countries in the Welcome universe.
“I think the NPS score shows that how the platform is being perceived by clients is very much in accord with BNP Paribas’ hopes for the platform. Our mission was to deliver a simple, user-friendly solution and clients do feel we are achieving that.”
Looking ahead, Niemi says the bank is intent on remaining agile in developing and enhancing Welcome procedures and functionalities. “We are engaged in a process of continuous improvement for Welcome, one that is responsive to feedback from clients as well new ideas generated for its further development in-house. We also continue to pursue ever increasing digitisation of customer journeys end-to-end.”
Initiatives being explored include ways of enabling onboarding clients to follow up an account opening process by opting for other services, for example a cash or liquidity management solution. Other initiatives include the development of a track-and-trace tool, an interface that can be used by clients so they can follow in real-time where they are in the onboarding process. “Such a tool would also help the bank to monitor the lead time for onboarding. It could, for example, generate alerts if there are unusual delays so that we can intervene to address any problems,” says Niemi.
Elsewhere, the platform is currently for use by corporates (and non-profit organisations in France) only, but BNP Paribas would like to make it available in the near future to other client segments, for example other FIs and funds. “That would require some re-engineering of the solution as KYC policies can vary according to business segment, but this is a challenge the team is looking forward to tackling,” says Niemi.
Like all banks, we still have plenty left to do when it comes to bringing digitisation to fully bear, not least for the benefit of clients.
Another battle the BNP Paribas team is constantly fighting is exposure to cyber threats. Naturally, the bank is keen to ensure Welcome remains at the leading edge of security, data- and identity protection. As such, the team keeps a close eye on new and emerging standards for cyber-security and is particularly interested in the potential of the EU’s proposed European Digital Identity (eID).
Elsewhere, Niemi explains that Welcome forms part of a wider BNP Paribas project to review, refresh, and simplify corporate banking across the board, with an emphasis on automating as much as possible and placing client needs centre stage.
A more recent, related initiative to emerge from this wider project is a central hub that gives corporates access to dedicated due diligence officers organised according to the various business groups served by the bank in all countries. The hub is currently in its pilot phase and being trialled by a limited number of clients, but the plan is to make it more widely available if it continues to deliver greater efficiency.
Niemi adds: “From the feedback on the hub so far, we can see clients really appreciate this facility. They especially like having one dedicated person who knows and understands their group very well and has a handle on the group’s entities in all the countries it operates in. So, we are hopeful of being able to roll this out more broadly in the years to come.”
In brief, the EU believes the eID can help ensure secure and trustworthy electronic identification and authentication by means of a personal digital wallet on a mobile phone. It would be made available to all EU citizens, residents, and businesses wanting to identify themselves or provide confirmation of certain personal information.
“The eID is still under construction and still has to be fully adopted by the European Parliament and Council, but it looks promising,” believes Niemi. “We will definitely explore the concept further and, if possible, include it in our own digital identity processes. This is another example of us actively looking to digitise and automate KYC as much as possible.”
Another hurdle facing the Welcome team is the perpetually shifting regulatory landscape around KYC requirements. BNP Paribas therefore carries out regular reviews of KYC rules, not only to ensure compliance, but also to look for further areas of innovation. Niemi says the bank’s ultimate target is for Welcome to leverage various tools and data sources to enable “perpetual KYC processing” that would ultimately enable much quicker responses to changes in KYC rules.
With regulators globally increasingly integrating ESG criteria into their guidelines and regulations, ESG represents another major digitisation challenge for institutions, says Niemi, adding: “ESG is now very much a part of KYC policies, so the information we collect on it from clients is also something we are very keen to digitise and see integrated with Welcome in the future.”
Clearly, the bank is not resting on its laurels with Welcome, a reflection of the importance it more broadly attaches to digitisation and innovation. “Like all banks, we still have plenty left to do when it comes to bringing digitisation to fully bear, not least for the benefit of clients,” she says.
“When creating new solutions, we always have in mind that it is truly a digital world now. Treasurers increasingly expect the kind of integrated, seamless, and speedy digital experience they enjoy in their personal lives to be reflected in the way they work. It’s a big challenge for banks and BNP Paribas is fully engaged with it – we look forward to seeing our clients reaping the benefits of our additional innovations.”
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