First impressions count

How KYC onboarding processes could be hampering your law firm’s growth.

Onboarding new clients is a laborious and non-billable task for law firms. With 120 days on average between lawyers doing the work and billing for it, you don’t need further delays from manual and fragmented Know Your Customer (KYC) processes. Nicholas Lory, Head of Data at Pace, thinks a client lifecycle management system is the answer.

Law firms are built on trust and integrity. A poor client onboarding experience could not only result in delayed billing and increased costs but potential compliance breaches and damage to your reputation, with the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal fining firms for failures such as not making adequate identity checks. The more complex and manual the process and the more stakeholders that are involved, the more likely there is to be human error.

Nicholas Lory says: “Customers value simplicity and speed. A disjointed onboarding process can really damage confidence and get you off on the wrong foot. If I’m asked twice for my passport, it feels like they probably misplaced it the first time. If a firm is doing things efficiently, if they’re handling data properly, it increases customer confidence.”

High-quality, centralised data is a critical component of KYC. Establishing a streamlined client lifecycle management process allows you to standardise KYC across the business, from prospecting and onboarding, through to completing the work, ongoing checks and offboarding. Using technologies like automation and AI enables faster, more accurate screening and ongoing monitoring, significantly reducing the likelihood of compliance failures. Pace recently identified improvements for a client that could reduce their KYC processing time by 83%. Relevant data can then be captured and stored in one place, allowing everyone to have access to the most up-to-date information.

Freeing up teams from doing manual compliance checks and typing data into spreadsheets can also allow them to use their creativity and autonomy to drive growth, says Lory.

He says: “If the processes are streamlined, optimised and automated, the risk and compliance staff can apply more sophisticated risk assessments to potential clients, which allows firms to onboard more risky, more complex, multi-jurisdictional clients, for example. It allows them to spend more time on the more difficult cases where a bit of human intervention is needed.”

By having a client lifecycle management system in place, you can start to generate greater insights for your organisation. You can then understand where potential process bottlenecks are within your onboarding and ongoing KYC processes.

Contact us now to discuss how you could streamline KYC.

Article contributor: Wings Turkington, Head of Knowledge Management