How AI Can Reduce Onboarding Time from Weeks to Hours in High-Value Corporate Accounts

Customer onboarding is a cumbersome process, especially in financial institutions. Performing identity verification, extensive paperwork, and document fraud detection, while providing a frictionless experience, make the process complex.  

The time it takes to onboard a customer has been slashed over time, years, but for corporate clients, it still takes a long time – considering the risks involved and additional due diligence steps.  The prolonged process also raises the risks of the clients completely abandoning onboarding. This directly contributes to loss of business.  

Financial institutions cannot overlook any of the steps involved because not conducting KYC and AML properly can lead to penalties from regulators.  

Here’s a list of the steps involved in high-value account onboarding: 

1. Verify a company’s legal status
2. Collect multiple documents (e.g., incorporation certificates, tax IDs, ownership structure charts)
3. Identify ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs)
4. Screen for any involvement in money laundering or fraud

It’s a manually intensive process, making the onboarding workflow slow and riddled with errors. Essentially, traditional high-value account onboarding is a combination of lengthy timelines, heavy compliance burden, and operational risk, so it needs a better approach. Digital onboarding has solved this to an extent, but the workflow for the financial institutions still runs on legacy systems. 

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Role of AI in High-Value Account Onboarding 

AI has an important role to play in onboarding. The technology’s ability to recognize patterns, processing large volumes of data, computer vision, etc., can make the onboarding process faster and more secure. Let’s explore how! 

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AI-Powered Document Verification and Identity Checks

AI greatly accelerates the document-heavy aspects of corporate onboarding. Instead of an employee manually reviewing passports, certificates, and forms, AI systems use computer vision and AI-charged OCR to extract and digitize data from a wide range of documents within seconds. 

Modern AI-driven onboarding solutions can ingest passports, IDs, articles of incorporation, shareholder registers, UBO statements, and more, automatically capturing key details (company names, addresses, lists of authorized signatories, ownership structure, etc.) with high accuracy. 

Moreover, AI performs instant authenticity checks on documents. Machine-learning algorithms can analyze security features and detect anomalies or forgeries in documents (e.g., a doctored incorporation paper or an edited bank statement). If any mismatch or tampering is detected, the system flags it for further review. 

Using facial recognition and liveness detection to ensure authenticity, confirming that corporate representatives or account signatories are genuine. By handling ID verification and document checks at breakneck speed, AI compresses what once took days of back-and-forth into a few minutes, vastly speeding up the onboarding step that traditionally caused the longest delays.

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Compliance with KYC/AML Requirements

High-value accounts pose great regulatory risks. For instance, a skewed structure of ownership, such as complex shell company arrangements, circular ownership, or nominee shareholders, could have serious legal consequences for all the parties involved. Teams charged with conducting background checks and risk assessments have a plethora of data points to scrutinize. Doing this manually not only takes time but could also lead to errors. 

AI-driven systems can automatically identify all key principals and beneficial owners of the business and cross-reference them against a multitude of watchlists and databases in real time. For example, AI will instantly screen the company and its officers against sanctions lists, politically exposed persons (PEP) lists, law enforcement databases, and even adverse media sources. What might take a human analyst days of digging through various systems, AI accomplishes in minutes. 

AI-based risk scoring can also incorporate transaction patterns, industry risk factors, and geographic risk in seconds, giving compliance officers a clear picture of the client’s risk level immediately. Importantly, these automated checks don’t just accelerate onboarding; they also improve accuracy. AI has been shown to detect forged identities and suspicious anomalies with far greater precision than manual reviews. 

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Time-to-Value Acceleration

One of AI’s most tangible benefits is the drastic reduction in onboarding time, which directly translates to faster “time to value” for both the client and the provider. This means instead of waiting a month or more to start using a banking service or platform, a new corporate client might be fully verified and activated on the same day. 

The corporate customer gains access to needed financial services (accounts, payments, credit lines, etc.) almost immediately, which means they can start transacting and deriving benefits from the partnership right away. For the financial institution or service provider, faster onboarding means generating business value faster, reducing the window in which a prospective client might lose patience and turn to a competitor. 

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Improved Customer Experience 

AI-powered onboarding doesn’t just make the process efficient; it also creates a much smoother experience for the clients. Traditionally, providing a frictionless experience to clients during the onboarding process has been full of endless forms, documents, and prolonged time periods for approval. 

Since AI takes the onus of extracting information from documents and filing them automatically in the relevant fields, the clients don’t have to do much. AI then verifies the information much faster, which further improves the experience.  

Clients also receive real-time feedback on application status, so they know what’s completed or if anything is outstanding, rather than being left in the dark. If a bottleneck does come up, AI-powered conversational agents are on standby to answer the clients’ questions. In fact, some banks even use interactive “conversational” forms powered by AI, which turn the tedious form-filling into a chat-like experience. 

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AI Onboarding by Arya AI

Arya AI’s digital onboarding platform brings together advanced AI capabilities into a unified, end-to-end workflow. Built on a modular architecture, it orchestrates document ingestion, identity verification, compliance checks, and client interaction in a single seamless experience.  ‍

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Key Components of Arya AI Onboarding: 

1. Digital experience: Dynamic and tailored forms for merchants that help cut costs and errors  ‍
2. Integrated KYB engine: Authenticate corporate representatives in real time with authorized data sources  ‍
3. Assess risks: Get risk profiles containing metrics like confidence scores to make more informed decisions  ‍
4. Build role-based journeys: Provide a tailored experience to all your clients and merchants 

With Arya AI’s onboarding solution, your institution can transform high-value corporate onboarding into a strategic differentiator. 

Explore more here: Arya.ai’s AI-powered onboarding.