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Improve Your KYC Customer Onboarding

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Improve Your KYC Customer Onboarding
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Optimize KYC Customer Onboarding in Refinitiv World-Check for Faster Compliance

Customer onboarding processes often encounter delays in verification and compliance reviews, leading to poor customer experiences. Our platform helps you pinpoint exact inefficiencies within your process, allowing you to streamline operations. This ensures faster onboarding, robust compliance, and improved customer satisfaction.

Download our pre-configured data template and address common challenges to reach your efficiency goals. Follow our six-step improvement plan and consult the Data Template Guide to transform your operations.

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Why Optimize KYC Customer Onboarding?

Know Your Customer, or KYC, Customer Onboarding is a pivotal process for financial institutions and regulated entities. It serves as the gateway for new customers, but it is also a critical line of defense against financial crime, money laundering, and terrorism financing. While systems like Refinitiv World-Check provide essential risk intelligence and robust AML screening, the overall onboarding process can still be fraught with inefficiencies, leading to delays, increased operational costs, and, critically, a poor customer experience. In today's competitive landscape, customers expect swift, seamless onboarding, and protracted processes can lead to abandonment, directly impacting revenue and market share.

The cost of inefficient KYC Customer Onboarding extends beyond lost customers. It includes higher manual effort, increased regulatory scrutiny, potential fines for non-compliance, and reputational damage. Understanding how to improve KYC Customer Onboarding is not just about speed, but about striking a vital balance between stringent compliance requirements and operational agility. Process optimization is essential to reduce KYC Customer Onboarding cycle time while maintaining, or even enhancing, regulatory adherence.

How Process Mining Illuminates Your Onboarding Journey

Process mining offers a unique, data-driven approach to analyzing and improving your KYC Customer Onboarding process. Instead of relying on assumptions or anecdotal evidence, process mining uses event logs generated by your core systems, including interactions with Refinitiv World-Check, to reconstruct the actual end-to-end customer application journey. By analyzing activities such as "Application Submitted," "Identity Verification Performed," "Background Checks Initiated," and "Compliance Review Completed," process mining reveals the true process flow, including all variations, deviations, and rework loops.

This analytical perspective empowers you to pinpoint exact bottlenecks that impede progress. For instance, you might discover that identity verification consistently delays applications for specific customer types, or that compliance reviews, despite leveraging sophisticated tools like Refinitiv World-Check, frequently lead to "Additional Information Requested" cycles, prolonging the overall cycle time. Process mining helps visualize where applications get stuck, which steps are repeated unnecessarily, and where manual interventions introduce significant delays, allowing you to focus your process optimization efforts precisely where they are needed most.

Key Areas for Process Improvement

With the insights gained from process mining, you can target specific areas to drive significant improvements in your KYC Customer Onboarding. Typical improvement opportunities include:

  • Streamlining document verification and collection: Identify points where incomplete documentation or repeated requests for information cause delays. Automate document pre-screening or integrate better with external verification services.
  • Optimizing handoffs and task assignments: Reduce idle times between sequential activities, particularly those involving different departments or systems. Ensure that tasks are routed to the right person or system at the right time.
  • Eliminating rework and deviations: Discover common rework loops, such as applications repeatedly returning for additional reviews or information. Understand the root causes, whether they are due to incomplete initial data capture, unclear policies, or system issues.
  • Enhancing the effectiveness of compliance reviews: Analyze the duration and outcomes of steps involving tools like Refinitiv World-Check. Ensure that the insights from screening are leveraged efficiently without creating unnecessary delays in the broader compliance workflow. Identify if certain risk levels or customer types consistently face longer review times, allowing for targeted process adjustments.
  • Accelerating decision-making: Pinpoint where approvals or rejections are delayed, enabling you to refine decision criteria or introduce more efficient approval workflows.

Expected Outcomes: Measurable Benefits and Enhanced Compliance

By leveraging process mining to optimize your KYC Customer Onboarding, you can anticipate substantial, measurable benefits:

  • Reduced Customer Onboarding Cycle Time: Significantly decrease the average time it takes for a customer to be onboarded, leading to faster revenue generation and improved customer satisfaction.
  • Enhanced Operational Efficiency: Lower operational costs by reducing manual effort, minimizing rework, and optimizing resource allocation across your onboarding teams.
  • Improved Compliance and Risk Management: Ensure consistent adherence to regulatory requirements by identifying and correcting process deviations, leading to a more robust compliance posture and reduced risk of penalties.
  • Better Customer Experience: Provide a smoother, quicker onboarding journey, fostering loyalty and positive brand perception from the very first interaction.
  • Increased Transparency: Gain a clear, real-time understanding of your entire KYC process, empowering continuous monitoring and data-driven decision-making.

Getting Started with Data-Driven Improvement

Embarking on a data-driven process improvement journey for your KYC Customer Onboarding with process mining means transforming challenges into opportunities. By understanding the true dynamics of your process, including interactions with critical systems like Refinitiv World-Check, you can move beyond guesswork and implement targeted changes that yield tangible results. This approach empowers you to achieve both compliance excellence and operational superiority, positioning your organization for sustainable growth and enhanced customer trust. Discover how you can leverage these insights to proactively manage and improve your KYC process today.

KYC Customer Onboarding AML compliance customer due diligence client onboarding risk assessment fraud prevention regulatory compliance financial services onboarding efficiency

Common Problems & Challenges

Identify which challenges are impacting you

Delays in document collection, review, and validation are a primary cause of extended KYC customer onboarding times. This directly impacts customer satisfaction, increases operational costs due to manual follow-ups, and can lead to customer drop-offs before account activation. Organizations struggle to pinpoint precisely where these verification steps stall.
ProcessMind analyzes event data from your KYC Customer Onboarding process, visualizing the exact stages where document verification or review activities introduce significant delays. It identifies specific bottlenecks, such as overloaded reviewers or recurring issues with particular document types, allowing you to streamline the verification workflow within Refinitiv World-Check and other integrated systems.

The compliance review stage, often leveraging tools like Refinitiv World-Check, frequently becomes a major bottleneck in the onboarding process. Lengthy review cycles not only delay customer activation but also risk non-compliance with evolving AML and KYC regulations, leading to potential fines and reputational damage. Identifying the specific reasons for these delays is crucial.
ProcessMind maps the flow of applications through compliance review, highlighting the specific individuals, departments, or conditions that cause delays. By analyzing cycle times and re-work loops within the 'Compliance Review Initiated' and 'Compliance Review Completed' activities, it pinpoints the root causes of these bottlenecks, enabling targeted process improvements to accelerate compliance checks.

Customers are often frustrated by multiple, repetitive requests for additional information during their onboarding journey. This fragmented communication increases effort for both the customer and internal teams, extends the overall onboarding cycle time, and significantly degrades the customer experience, potentially leading to churn. Understanding why and when these requests occur is vital.
ProcessMind visualizes the frequency and context of 'Additional Information Requested' activities, identifying patterns and root causes. It can reveal if requests are consistently made after a specific step, by certain users, or for particular customer segments, allowing you to optimize initial data collection and reduce subsequent requests in your KYC Customer Onboarding process.

A high rate of application rejections is costly, as resources are spent processing applications that ultimately fail. This indicates issues earlier in the KYC Customer Onboarding process, such as unclear requirements, poor initial screening, or inefficient risk assessment, leading to wasted effort and missed revenue opportunities. Understanding the common reasons for rejection is key.
ProcessMind analyzes the paths applications take that ultimately lead to 'Application Rejected'. By correlating rejection reasons with preceding activities and attributes like 'Risk Level' or 'Document Status', it uncovers common precursors to rejection, allowing you to refine initial screening criteria and improve upstream process steps to reduce costly rejections.

Deviations from the ideal or standardized KYC Customer Onboarding process lead to unpredictable cycle times, higher error rates, and increased compliance risks. When different applications follow varied paths without clear justification, it becomes impossible to manage expectations, forecast workload, or ensure consistent adherence to policies. Standardizing is critical for efficiency.
ProcessMind automatically discovers all actual process variants from your event data, visually highlighting deviations from the intended golden path. It quantifies the frequency and impact of these non-standard flows, allowing you to identify where process discipline is lacking or where legitimate exceptions need to be formalized, ensuring consistency across your Refinitiv World-Check integrated process.

Regularly missing Service Level Agreement (SLA) targets for customer onboarding completion signifies underlying inefficiencies and directly impacts customer satisfaction and potentially regulatory compliance. These breaches can result in penalties, reputational damage, and lost business, making it essential to identify the precise steps causing the delays.
ProcessMind uses the 'SLA Target Date' attribute to highlight applications that breach their service level agreements. It then drills down into the process flow of these specific cases, identifying the exact activities or handoffs responsible for the delays, enabling you to optimize those critical path steps and improve overall onboarding speed within your KYC process.

Delays in initiating crucial background checks, particularly within systems like Refinitiv World-Check, prolong the entire KYC Customer Onboarding journey. If the 'Background Checks Initiated' activity is consistently delayed after necessary preceding steps, it adds unnecessary waiting time, impacting efficiency and potentially delaying risk mitigation.
ProcessMind measures the lead time between relevant preceding activities and the 'Background Checks Initiated' activity. It reveals where handoffs are slow or where prerequisites for initiating these checks are not met promptly, allowing you to streamline the trigger points and accelerate this critical compliance step.

Applications frequently cycling back through 'Risk Assessment Performed' indicate either incomplete initial assessments, changing risk factors, or unclear guidelines. Each re-evaluation adds significant rework, consumes valuable analyst time, and extends the onboarding duration, creating a frustrating experience for both customers and internal teams.
ProcessMind visualizes and quantifies these rework loops, showing how often applications re-enter the risk assessment phase and which preceding activities or attributes trigger them. This allows you to identify areas where upfront information gathering or initial assessment quality can be improved to reduce redundant work in your KYC Customer Onboarding process.

Poor visibility into the current 'Document Status' or overall application status leads to operational inefficiencies, redundant inquiries, and an inability to accurately inform customers. When status updates are not performed promptly, it creates a lack of transparency, making it difficult to manage the process and prioritize work effectively.
ProcessMind tracks the timeliness of status updates by correlating activities with changes in 'Document Status' or overall application progression. It highlights where information lags, allowing you to identify gaps in reporting or process steps that are not being recorded efficiently, thereby improving real-time visibility and communication for your KYC Customer Onboarding.

Certain users or departments become bottlenecks due to an imbalanced workload, while others may be underutilized. This leads to backlogs, extended processing times, and potential burnout for overloaded teams, impacting overall efficiency and employee morale within the KYC Customer Onboarding process. Optimizing resource allocation is key.
ProcessMind identifies specific 'Initiating User' or 'Department' attributes associated with prolonged activity durations or queues. It quantifies the workload distribution and processing times across your teams, revealing where resources are overstretched or underutilized, enabling more balanced allocation and improved flow through the Refinitiv World-Check related activities.

Friction and delays often occur when applications transition between different departments or teams during the KYC Customer Onboarding process. These handoff points, if not managed efficiently, can introduce significant idle times, loss of context, and rework, slowing down the entire process and causing frustration among teams.
ProcessMind meticulously maps the precise time taken for applications to move between activities performed by different 'Department' or 'Initiating User' groups. It visually highlights the longest waiting times at these critical handoff points, allowing you to target specific inter-departmental interfaces for improvement and streamline collaborative efforts.

Typical Goals

Define what success looks like

Reduce the time it takes to verify customer documents. This speeds up the entire KYC onboarding process, improving customer satisfaction and reducing operational costs for Refinitiv World-Check users.ProcessMind identifies bottlenecks in document review activities, highlighting specific steps or users causing delays. It measures actual versus target completion times, allowing for targeted process adjustments and automation opportunities to enhance efficiency.

This goal aims to significantly reduce the time spent in the compliance review stage of KYC onboarding, ensuring faster application approvals without compromising regulatory integrity. Quicker reviews mean customers are onboarded faster, enhancing their experience.ProcessMind maps the compliance review sub-process, revealing hidden delays and rework loops. It quantifies the impact of these bottlenecks, enabling organizations to implement process changes or resource reallocations within Refinitiv World-Check to achieve significant efficiency gains.

Reduce the number of times customers are asked for more information during onboarding. This significantly improves customer experience by preventing frustration and shortening the overall onboarding timeline, crucial for retaining new clients.ProcessMind analyzes event logs to identify patterns leading to repeated information requests. It pinpoints the root causes, such as incomplete initial applications or unclear document requirements, enabling proactive adjustments to forms or communication protocols within the Refinitiv World-Check process.

Decrease the rate at which customer applications are rejected due to preventable issues, such as incomplete information or minor procedural errors. This improves conversion rates and ensures that valid customers are not lost, directly impacting revenue.ProcessMind visualizes rejection pathways, identifying common pre-rejection activities or attribute values. It highlights where rejections occur in the Refinitiv World-Check process and suggests improvements, such as earlier intervention or better guidance, to convert applications into successful onboardings.

Establish consistent and optimized pathways for KYC customer onboarding, eliminating deviations that lead to inefficiencies or compliance risks. A standardized process ensures predictable outcomes and easier training for new staff.ProcessMind automatically discovers all actual process variants from event data, comparing them against ideal models. It quantifies the cost and time impact of non-compliant or inefficient variants, allowing organizations to enforce best practices across their Refinitiv World-Check operations.

Achieve consistent compliance with Service Level Agreements for KYC onboarding cycle times. Meeting SLAs enhances customer trust, avoids penalties, and signals operational excellence, especially when dealing with high volumes of Refinitiv World-Check screenings.ProcessMind monitors case durations against defined SLA targets in real-time. It provides alerts for potential breaches and identifies specific activities or resource allocations that consistently cause delays, enabling proactive intervention to keep processes on track.

Reduce the lag time between relevant milestones and the initiation of crucial background checks, ensuring these critical steps begin as early as possible in the onboarding flow. Faster initiation can significantly cut overall cycle times.ProcessMind analyzes the time gap between preceding activities and the 'Background Checks Initiated' event. It uncovers process steps or system delays that prevent prompt initiation, offering insights to automate or re-sequence tasks within Refinitiv World-Check.

Eradicate instances where risk assessments need to be repeated or extensively revised due to errors or incomplete data. Reducing rework saves significant time and resources, allowing analysts to focus on new cases.ProcessMind visualizes process flows, clearly highlighting where activities like 'Risk Assessment Performed' are repeatedly executed for the same customer application. It identifies the triggers for these loops, such as insufficient initial data or unclear guidelines, providing a basis for process redesign within Refinitiv World-Check.

Ensure that the current status of each customer application is accurately and promptly reflected across all relevant systems and dashboards. Better visibility improves internal coordination and external communication with customers.ProcessMind provides a live view of process execution, tracking the progress of each 'Customer Application' case through its various 'Activities'. It identifies where status updates are delayed or missing, allowing for system integrations or automation to ensure timely and accurate reporting for Refinitiv World-Check users.

Ensure that the right resources, whether human or automated, are utilized effectively across the KYC onboarding process, preventing bottlenecks caused by overloaded teams or underutilized capacity. This reduces operational costs and improves throughput.ProcessMind analyzes resource assignments to activities, revealing imbalances in workload and idle times. It provides insights into how resources are used in Refinitiv World-Check, enabling managers to reallocate tasks, cross-train staff, or automate repetitive steps for better efficiency.

Smooth the transitions of customer applications between different departments, such as initial review, risk, and compliance, eliminating delays and communication breakdowns. Efficient handoffs are crucial for a seamless end-to-end process.ProcessMind visualizes the flow of cases across different 'Departments' or 'Users', identifying where delays or errors frequently occur during transitions. It quantifies the time lost in these handoffs, providing data to optimize communication protocols or integrate systems used in Refinitiv World-Check.

The 6-Step Improvement Path for KYC Customer Onboarding

1

Download the Template
2

Export Your Data
3

Upload Your Dataset
4

Analyze Your Process
5

Implement Improvements
6

Monitor Your Process
1

Download the Template

What to do

Obtain the pre-configured Excel template for KYC Customer Onboarding to ensure your data is structured correctly for analysis. This template guides you on necessary fields.

View Data Template Guide Download Template
Why it matters

Using the right template ensures data compatibility, avoiding errors and accelerating the initial setup for accurate process analysis.

Expected outcome

A structured Excel template ready for populating with your KYC Customer Onboarding data.

WHAT YOU WILL GET

Uncover Key Insights in KYC Onboarding Workflows

ProcessMind transforms your KYC data into dynamic visualizations, revealing every step and interaction. Gain deep insights into bottlenecks and compliance gaps within your Refinitiv World-Check process.
  • Visualize actual KYC onboarding paths
  • Pinpoint compliance review delays
  • Optimize Refinitiv World-Check steps
  • Track customer experience improvements
Discover your actual process flow
Discover your actual process flow
Identify bottlenecks and delays
Identify bottlenecks and delays
Analyze process variants
Analyze process variants
Design your optimized process
Design your optimized process

TYPICAL RESULTS

Achieving Efficiency in KYC Onboarding

Process mining provides a data-driven approach to identify bottlenecks and optimize the KYC Customer Onboarding journey. By analyzing real execution data, including interactions with Refinitiv World-Check, organizations can significantly enhance process efficiency and customer experience.

0 %
Faster Review Cycles

Reduction in document & compliance review time

Process mining identifies bottlenecks in document and compliance reviews, leading to significant reductions in processing time, enhancing efficiency and customer experience.
0 %
Fewer Info Requests

Decrease in additional information requests

By pinpointing root causes of incomplete applications, organizations can significantly reduce the need for additional information, accelerating onboarding and improving customer satisfaction.
10- 0 %
Improved SLA Adherence

Higher compliance with service level agreements

Process mining uncovers deviations preventing timely completion, helping teams meet regulatory SLAs and internal targets consistently, reducing penalties and reputational risk.
0 %
Optimized Resource Use

Enhanced efficiency in compliance resource allocation

Understanding actual resource utilization and idle times enables better workload distribution, reducing operational costs and ensuring staff focus on value-added activities.
15- 0 %
Higher Process Conformance

Increased adherence to standardized KYC flows

By identifying and standardizing process variants, organizations ensure consistent, compliant, and efficient onboarding, reducing errors and improving audit readiness.
~ 0 days
Faster Background Checks

Reduced time to initiate background checks

Pinpointing delays before background checks ensures quicker initiation, accelerating a critical, time-consuming phase of KYC onboarding and overall cycle time.

Results vary based on process complexity and data quality. These figures represent typical improvements observed across implementations.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions

Process mining analyzes your existing KYC event data to reveal the actual process flow, identifying inefficiencies, compliance gaps, and bottlenecks. It helps pinpoint areas like protracted document verification, rework loops in risk assessment, and inefficient departmental handoffs. This allows you to target specific areas for optimization and achieve a more streamlined, compliant, and efficient onboarding journey.

You will primarily need event logs that include a case identifier, activity name, and a timestamp for each step of the onboarding process. For KYC, this means data points related to customer application submission, background checks, document verification, compliance reviews, and status updates. Data from Refinitiv World-Check regarding screening results and their processing will be crucial event activities.

You can expect to see significant improvements such as accelerated document review completion, minimized additional information requests, and reduced unnecessary application rejections. Process mining helps standardize onboarding process variants, ensuring timely SLA adherence and ultimately optimizing resource allocation efficiency. These lead to faster customer onboarding and improved compliance.

Initial insights and a baseline process model can often be generated within weeks, depending on data availability and quality. Significant improvement recommendations and a clear understanding of bottlenecks usually emerge within one to three months. The actual implementation of changes and the realization of sustained improvements will then follow, requiring ongoing monitoring.

The primary technical requirement is access to your system's event data, including audit logs or database tables that capture activity, timestamp, and case ID. You will need a process mining software platform, which can be cloud-based or on-premises. Basic data integration capabilities are also necessary to extract and transform the raw data into a suitable format for analysis.

Data extraction methods vary, but common approaches include direct database queries, API integrations, or exporting data from system logs. It involves identifying relevant tables or logs that contain the case identifier, activity name, and timestamp for each step of the KYC process. This extracted raw data then needs transformation into an event log format suitable for the process mining tool.

Process mining is generally non-disruptive to live operations as it primarily uses historical data. Data extraction can be performed in the background or during off-peak hours. The analysis and insights generation occur separately from your operational systems, allowing your teams to continue their work without interruption while improvements are being identified.

The accuracy of insights directly correlates with the quality and completeness of your event data. When accurate and comprehensive event logs are provided, process mining offers a highly precise, data-driven view of your actual process execution. It reveals deviations, bottlenecks, and rework loops that are often invisible through manual analysis or traditional reporting.

Yes, process mining can significantly enhance KYC compliance by visualizing all process variants and identifying any deviations from defined regulatory workflows. It helps highlight instances of non-adherence, such as skipped steps or unauthorized shortcuts, ensuring that all necessary checks and approvals are consistently executed. This provides an auditable trail of compliance throughout the onboarding journey.

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