An understanding of compliance as the sine qua non of wealth management client onboarding is being supplanted by an awareness of the potential for relationship upside.

The ability to seamlessly onboard clients has become table stakes in the age of digital advice. Rising expectations among clients and advisors have raised the bar for wealth management incumbents, who must balance regulatory and compliance requirements with the need to drive satisfaction and cross sales. To be effective, the answers offered by the new generation of tools must be considered within the framework of that firm’s broader technological transformation.

Transforming onboarding from a cost center to a source of revenue generation demands an investment in workflow automation and analytics-driven insight, for which data is the secret sauce. It also means shepherding the flow of clean data across business lines.