KYC onboarding, rebuilt so applicants finish

Context

Onboarding is the first thing a new customer experiences of a bank — and here it was the slowest. The applicant journey stretched across three systems: an identity tool, a document store and a manual review queue, each holding part of the truth and none of them quite agreeing with the others.

Challenge

Every extra document request lost real customers. Applicants were asked for the same information more than once, cases sat waiting in a general review queue, and the median time to a decision had stretched to nine days. Mid-application drop-off was the visible cost; the quieter one was the staff time spent reconciling three systems by hand.

What we built

We rebuilt onboarding as a single verified flow. Documents are read and checked up front, so applicants are asked once. Cases route automatically to the right desk instead of a shared queue. Audit trails are written into the system from day one — with the whole journey delivered to UK & EU GDPR standards and strong access control throughout.

How it ran

The engagement followed our standard arc — strategy, build, run. It started with an audit of the existing stack and workflows and a costed, sequenced plan. Delivery was senior-led: weekly demos rather than monthly decks, security and QA gates on every release, and documentation written as we went, with one named owner accountable end to end. Once live, the flow moved into SLA-backed support and monitoring.