Cenotech’s Success in Digitizing Customer On-boarding to Accelerate Growth

Case Study

Digitizing customer on-boarding to help accelerate financial services business

Background

A large investment management firm, based in Boston, Massachusetts, sought to provide clients with superior performance, top quality service and value-added products across a range of investment disciplines and distribution channels. Due to rapid growth and ever-increasing regulatory requirements for audit and transparency, the process of adding new accounts manually became increasingly complex and time-consuming.

“Customers do not want to wait longer than absolutely necessary to begin their planned investments,” explains the Head of Investment Technology for the firm. “Reducing the time, it takes to bring an account to an investable state is critical to providing a better customer experience.”

The large investment manager chose Cenotech Solutions and the BonitaSoft application platform to transform the entire on-boarding process for new accounts, which involves nearly a dozen teams and almost as many systems. Cenotech Solutions was engaged to lead the transformation from current state analysis through solution development and deployment. Cenotech’s consultants designed the future state platform that supports the expanding account growth and provided a platform for automating additional business processes.

By transforming this critical business process, the client now has the orchestration and transparency needed to monitor hundreds of new accounts and get clients up and running seamlessly. Everything is managed and monitored from a dashboard that accommodates both users and management.

Challenges

Cenotech’s client faced operational challenges and inefficiencies with the onboarding of new accounts process, costing the firm millions:

• Large Account Volumes
• 70,000+ accounts across affiliates
• 50–60 new accounts on average were added daily with 500+ emails and 295 tasks used in the end-to-end process
• Multiple Data Sources across all affiliates
• Data gathered from multiple vendors, sources, and operations teams across multiple tool kits that the team currently used to resolve client data issues
• Poor Data Quality
• Current data vendors and related outsourcing firms sent inaccurate data and operations team were required to research each one of those mistakes, even though they didn’t have full transparency into the cause of the issues.
• Continual account growth demanded
• Accounts continued to grow at the rate of hundreds per day
• New regulatory pressures and requirements
• Additional regulatory and federal pressures became hard to support
• New client customization requirements
• Added pressures by clients to customize, adapt more quickly to change and support more outcome driven strategies became cumbersome
• Client demands continued to increase
• Increased demand for more targeted, impactful, personal engagement with the end-customer and prospects
• Risk mitigation requested from C-Suite executives
• Increased demand by senior leadership to lower costs and implement investment talent at scale

Approach

System conversions and implementations, including those involving external stakeholders, including vendors, are always challenging.

Cenotech’s approach addressed the challenges while also ensuring a scalable future.

• Identified key stakeholders and conducted Interviews/workshops across product management, technology, operations and internal and external users
• Ensured RMA was set up on all required platforms (e.g. APL, Perform, SalesPage, REVPORT) to support trading, customer service, billing, asset reporting, performance analysis, compensation and follow-on sales
• Captured RMA attributes in central locations (e.g. attributes from input forms, APL, intermediate spreadsheets, Perform, SalesPage, AIM and REVPORT)
• Ensured all systems and platforms used the same account attributes, whenever possible
• Communicated and trained staff who needed to perform their own processes
• Facilitated discussion about new use cases and attribute values

Solution

Cenotech delivered the following as the final solution:

• Provided documented feedback from all stakeholder meetings and workshops
• Presented detailed analysis of implementation solutions with priorities and risks included
• Recommended short and long — term actions to resolve the inefficiency issue and build a scalable future
• Facilitated the selection of a new “Business Process Management” tool, BonitaSoft BPMS.
• Implemented BonitaSoft BPMS and continue to evaluate it going forward

Results

Cenotech’s business and technical expertise implementing systems was critical to the success of the project. Automating onboarding through a business-process-management-based platform now provides the orchestration and transparency required to monitor hundreds of new accounts.

The automated process is now managed and monitored from a dashboard that accommodates both users and management. This firm’s staff has been freed up and as a result, the firm’s end-customers are much happier.

As the company’s business continues to grow, expand and regulatory requirements evolve, the flexibility of the implemented BPM platform allows the firm to adapt on-the-fly, reduce expenses, optimize development cycles and keep their business moving forward.

Overall improvements to the firm’s bottom line from the project include:

• Created Automated metrics to track trends in order to predict volume surges and measure delivery vs. expected SLAs w/audit trail
• Developed Automated Alert Functionality with Centralized Notifications
• Standardized conventions for creating New Account emails (e.g. Subject line and consistent message body) and automate correspondence
• Provided clearer onboarding error details for onboarding team to resolve
• Centralized client operational tracking
• Developed a standard form and mastering process for account onboarding that collects and maintains data as the account record is passed between groups
• Created the ability to trigger “OK to Invoice” based on policy decision.
• Updated email notification to client informing him/her of invoicing policy and that the account is now active.
• Enhanced support of audit requirements using features in the new tool to document end-to-end process.
• Added the ability to extract data from source systems and provide an on-the-fly reconciliation view.
• Allows client to use traditional, robust, supportable methods to automate across systems — API, Messaging…

About Cenotech Solutions LLC

Cenotech Solutions is a financial services technology consulting group focused on asset management and asset servicing firms’ end-to-end automation, technical and business challenges. It provides the expertise to address today’s most challenging issues. Its consultants have the necessary business understanding and technology tool kits to reach across applications, address integration quandaries, and improve workflows & communications of complex business processes. It supports the creation of optimally efficient operating environments for its clients.