In financial services, the onboarding journey takes on heightened significance. It’s not just about welcoming new customers—it’s about safeguarding their information, validating identity, mitigating risk, ensuring regulatory compliance, and making a great first impression.
To achieve these goals, modernizing the decisioning process is crucial. In fact, decisioning lies at the core of effective fraud prevention—the strategic process of making informed choices based on data-driven insights and risk assessments. Appropriately deployed decisioning helps financial institutions and fraud prevention teams implement proactive measures that safeguard customers and defend against fraudulent activities across the entire customer life cycle, from onboarding through collections and every transaction in between.
Modernizing your decisioning approach
Financial institutions must consider numerous factors as they strive to modernize their decision-making processes. The goal is to seamlessly manage the customer experience while addressing evolving risks, ultimately ensuring a higher investment return and a quicker time to value.
One of the most common conversations I have with executive leaders on the business side involves the need for agility in their technology to better serve them in running the business. Yet, their IT counterparts are buckling under the weight of the legacy technology investments with their cumbersome integrations.
Organizations identify problems and solve them with one technology. The next problem is solved with a different technology, and so on. The result is limited agility to meet the expectations of the business and its end consumers.
Taking a holistic approach is critical to rationalizing the complexities of IT infrastructure, helping organizations to make enterprise decisions across risk, fraud, compliance and marketing through a unified architecture. If you look at the customer engagement at the time of onboarding, for example, there are a multitude of different decisions that must be made, including:
- Do I originate credit?
- How do I price the product based on the risks?
- Is this application fraudulent or not?
- Is this a valid identity?
- What is the customer risk ranking?
- What product do we position to them next? Or what action do we take?
Each of these questions typically relates to an individual technology deployment, offering unique opportunities to optimize customer engagement. As digital capabilities proliferate, they introduce layers of technology that, when effectively managed, can exceed consumers' expectations today.
Businesses that can consolidate onto a more consistent architecture will ultimately reduce the complexity of their IT environment. This will help them meet the emerging needs of their customers while providing the business with the agility to combat evolving trends within financial crime.
Mastering the art of decisioning across the entire customer lifecycle is essential for driving business growth and increasing satisfaction. By doing so, businesses can deliver personalized, streamlined experiences that set the stage for long-term success.
