The demand for a personalized, digital banking experience continues to accelerate, and it’s in our best interest to bring banking directly into the client’s domain in an embedded and contextual way. At the forefront of our business, FISPAN is dedicated to solving our clients’ greatest challenges, and we know that helping businesses bank better ultimately starts with the users themselves.
This article will discuss how FISPAN kicks off the client experiences lifecycle by creating a seamless and unified onboarding experience.
Bank Onboarding Versus FISPAN Onboarding
When we talk about “onboarding,” the word itself is not very helpful since it can be interpreted in many different ways. Generally, within a bank, the idea of onboarding refers to either the process where an individual becomes a bank client from scratch and is provisioned with resources (bank accounts/products) or channels (Portal, Mobile, API, File), or it refers to the act of providing an existing client with access to new resources.
For FISPAN, onboarding means the act of enabling a client to install their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) adapter and start transacting with it. This then leads to creating a client profile (having the available resources and required details to access such resources) and enacting the process of connecting your client’s business application to those resources. Today, the act of creating a client profile is usually an asynchronous process with the bank. Once FISPAN receives the package of data from the bank, we can create the final mile of client onboarding and the rest is automated via the ERP Onboarding Wizard, which we will discuss below.
In essence, onboarding is the totality of experiences that allows a client to discover the app, request access, become provisioned, install and connect the app, and start transacting themselves.
ERP Onboarding Wizard
In order to manage all the steps between “discovering the application” and starting to transact with the bank’s ERP adapter plug-in, FISPAN created something called the ERP Onboarding Wizard. This client-facing application is customized at the union of each required connectivity step and the requirements of each bank’s unique posture of authentication, permissions, and the like. We have built in a high degree of flexibility to meet both universal and unique objectives, including efficiency — ideally, this process would take around 20 minutes from start to finish.
An example wizard looks something like this, where user connectivity is established and permissions required are made clear:
Client App Discovery
How do clients find out about the ERP adapters you offer as a bank? Today it happens primarily offline, with your sales force identifying potential users and then requesting that those clients gain access to the network where the bank or FISPAN can then trigger the process. In this case, the client will receive an email that will help them start the onboarding wizard experience.
Other ways clients find out about ERP adapters include finding it within a bank portal (under a user authenticated session), seeing the app in an app store or it could even be a part of some out-of-band marketing experience the client has encountered:
The asynchronous method is very effective for bank pilots as it does not require a lot of changes to your BAU processes for onboarding clients to services via a channel like File Exchange. However, at scale, these other channels of discovery will become an important part of the bank’s distribution strategy for the plug-ins.
The medium-term evolution is taking interest from clients in real-time, but still onboarding them asynchronously at the constraint of your back-office processes, or having the client receive sandbox access in real-time and their production access later on.
In order to achieve real time automated onboarding, we would need some building block tools in front of the bank. Certain infrastructure pieces include three-legged OAuth, client profile discovery (JWT or self-identification endpoints), potentially federated SSO, and potential changes to how server-side resources are provisioned to new clients. Having some of these elements present during the process will allow discovery to lead to onboarded customers in a smoother fashion.
Provisioning
An important part of delivering the FISPAN experience, and as mentioned above, is the underlying product/data resources that exist at the bank. Beyond this, FISPAN will need to gain an understanding of what that client has provisioned, some descriptive data about that client, and where relevant any credential information we would need to access that resource about the client.
Offline Today
Generally, when a bank finds a client who wants an adapter today, they enter some kind of implementation request in their CRM which kicks off a back-office provisioning exercise for bank accounts or products. At that point in the process, FISPAN will receive a package of details about said client and details on what bank resources we can consume for that client and with what credentials.
When FISPAN has been provided with the necessary amount of data about each client they want to onboard, we can then manually create that client profile and trigger the wizard. Oftentimes, if the client is new to the bank or expanding their service level with them, this will also require the bank to run their normal onboarding, implementation, and provisioning process for those new clients.
This is a sufficient and positive experience for clients of a certain size. However, in the future, we anticipate a move to an automated provisioning version of FISPAN where, based on some client authentication event, we receive a token to talk to the bank and will receive enough context on the client and the available resources (bank accounts, payment methods) that we can auto-provision the client in FISPAN and trigger the wizard.
To learn more about our client onboarding processes, contact us here. Schedule a demo with us to learn how FISPAN can help banks better serve their business clients.