Description

The Problem

Adviser onboarding in for a Financial Dealergroup is an extremely manual, slow, repetitive process. The standard business model for profitable Dealergroups is to scale their network of advisors. We were tasked with replicating the existing manual process, while uncovering efficiencies in automation and digitisation of information.

The Original Process

Admin emails multiple forms to individual with instructions.

Individual fills out each form, signs, scans and uploads with other identity and qualifying information.

This data is reviewed by the admin. If it is complete, they enter their data into the system and email them a welcome pack and certification.

If this ‘application’ is incomplete, admin staff will confer with the applicant via phone and email until the complete information is finalised.

The Challenges

• How to minimise the amount of interaction between admin staff and individual applicants.
• How to, within the bounds of compliance, simplify the application process enough, as to limit the number of times applicants would have to come back to the system to complete sections.
• How to simplify the support process for administration staff.
• How to ensure transparency over the process and accuracy and ownership of data entry.

The Approach

Our approach was to boil down the process to basic principles - an exchange of a set of identifying and qualifying information.

The existing process involved a lot of double entry of the same data points and fragmented and in some cases completely opaque overview of progress and status within the onboarding process.

I reviewed all of the forms that were required to be completed for a single individual application, grouping these fields into similar areas. Where compliance allowed, we created more generic questions or datapoints that allowed us to answer multiple questions, infer data or skip unnecessary inputs.

Outcomes

Dealer Groups were able to streamline the process of onboarding Representatives. We were able to de-risk their previously manual process and consolidate the application process and compliance into a single system.

As next steps for this system, we have begun to refine application forms and provide more flexibility for groups to customise and maintain their process further.