THE CHALLENGE

Streamlining core legacy processes spanning multiple departments is one of the toughest challenges for any organisation, yet it comes with the largest cost-savings opportunities. One of FireDrake’s consultants was asked to help the client onboarding/KYC area at a large global British institution where the ‘core’ team spanned across the globe.

The existing process involved numerous stakeholders across a variety of departments such as Legal, Compliance, Risk, Trade Support, Trading, Sales, Operations, Fraud and Data. Although a tool was utilised to track onboarding of clients, it was primarily a manual process; it was close to reaching capacity and required a full-time team of 50+ people to maintain it. The average processing times for onboarding changes to existing clients was over six months, with onboarding of complex clients taking one to two years.

THE SOLUTION

A two-month review was carried out with all stakeholders across the front, middle and back-office, to assess the ‘ideal state’ (including future regulatory impacts). In parallel, we recommended that the client purchase a benchmarking assessment and move to a ‘Request for Proposal’ stage to identify and validate potential replacement solutions to address the gap.

Once a high-level business case and target architecture were put together, the front office authorised financing to progress to the design stage. Over the course of six months, a number of analysis and design workshops were carried out with teams from various stakeholder departments to identify, analyse and design an appropriate solution. This included identifying due-diligence requirements, checks and balances, data feeds, document repositories, inputs and outputs from other key systems such as Risk and Fraud, client/product/ entity hierarchies, new product approval sign-offs, etc.

We also re-engineered a variety of paths and tailored others – such as shortening processes for simple changes that did not require a full review. FireDrake provided training for the Onboarding/KYC managers in process re-engineering and streamlining, to better equip them to identify and enact future improvements.

Six months into the process, financing for a workflow tool was secured. Implementation and delivery was handed to an internal IT team. The new process has the capability to onboard clients in less than half the time initially sought by the client; is supported by a team half the size, and has the capacity to onboard over twice the number of clients, under more rigorous regulatory requirements than under the previous process.