Beyond Compliance: Why “Time to Transact” is Your Most Critical KPI

The first impression a new client has of your company isn't made by your marketing or your sales pitch. It’s forged during onboarding.

In a competitive market, the speed and efficiency of this process directly impact your bottom line. A slow, manual, and disjointed onboarding experience doesn't just frustrate clients; it delays revenue, increases operational costs, and gives competitors an opening.

This is why "time to transact" has become a defining key performance indicator (KPI) for modern financial institutions, as Yetunde Ekunwe, Product Initiatives Executive at Bank of America, noted in the webinar “Beyond Compliance: Transforming the Client Experience with Intelligent Data.” The gap between a client saying "yes" and their ability to actually use your services is a critical window where value is either created or destroyed.

Experts Yetunde Ekunwe and Kevin Shine break down why "time to transact" matters so much, the hidden costs of outdated manual processes, and how a strategic shift toward data orchestration can transform your client onboarding from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.

The Onboarding Bottleneck: A Disjointed Client Experience

Many established banks and fintechs struggle with an onboarding process that Kevin Shine, Head of Sales at Fraud.net, describes as "slow and manual." This is often the result of legacy systems, fragmented workflows, and data silos. Institutions may be collecting the right information, but without a unified strategy, the process becomes inefficient and repetitive for both the client and internal teams.

“Our clients are collecting the right data; they’re just lacking a coherent strategy," Shine explains. "That leads to silos and redundancy.”

This lack of a coherent strategy manifests in several ways:

• Repetitive Data Requests: Clients are asked for the same information multiple times by different departments (e.g., Compliance, Fraud, Credit Risk).
• Manual Document Handling: Teams spend countless hours manually collecting, reviewing, and verifying physical or scanned documents.
• Data Silos: Information collected by one team is not easily accessible to another, resulting in repeated outreach and an inconsistent client view.

The result is a poor client experience. Business customers, in particular, expect a seamless, digital-first process. When they encounter delays and redundant requests, their confidence in your institution's ability to serve their needs begins to fade.

The Hidden Costs of Manual Processes

The problems with manual onboarding extend far beyond client frustration. These outdated workflows create significant internal drag, leading to what Shine refers to as "manual process fatigue." When skilled compliance, risk, and operations professionals are bogged down with repetitive administrative tasks, the consequences are severe.

This fatigue leads to:

• Increased Error Rates: Manual data entry and review are prone to human error, which can lead to compliance breaches and costly remediation efforts.
• Higher Operational Costs: More employee hours are spent on low-value tasks, inflating the cost of acquiring each new client.
• Employee Burnout: Talented analysts become demoralized and disengaged, leading to higher turnover and a loss of institutional knowledge.

The core of the problem lies in how data is collected, organized, and used. As Shine points out, the biggest challenges are "data organization, data labeling, and streamlining the usability of information after it's collected." Without a system to manage data effectively, institutions are stuck in a cycle of inefficiency that is expensive, risky, and unsustainable.

From Data Collection to Data Orchestration

How can financial institutions break this cycle? The solution is a strategic shift from simple data collection to intelligent data orchestration. Orchestration is about creating a unified, automated workflow that collects, validates, and shares data across the entire organization in real-time. It’s a framework built on the principle of "measure twice, ask once."

An orchestration platform acts as a central hub, connecting your existing systems and data sources. Instead of manual hand-offs between siloed teams, the platform automates the flow of information.

This approach involves a three-part framework:

1. Collection: Moving from manual document requests to digital data collection through APIs and other automated sources.
2. Validation: Instantly verifying the accuracy and legitimacy of the data collected against trusted third-party sources.
3. Verification: Automating the risk assessment and decisioning process based on predefined rules and machine learning models.

By orchestrating the onboarding process, you empower every team, from onboarding to fraud to credit risk, to work from a single, unified view of the client. This allows multiple independent teams to examine the same data, each with its own perspective, within a single platform. This eliminates redundant work and ensures consistent, data-driven decision-making across the board.

The Business Impact of Faster Onboarding

The benefits of reducing time to transact are immediate and substantial. By implementing an orchestration strategy, financial institutions can achieve significant improvements in efficiency, profitability, and client satisfaction.

Shine shared a powerful example of a payments company that transformed its merchant onboarding. "They reduced their onboarding time from an average of four to six weeks down to less than a day." This dramatic acceleration enabled them to capture revenue more quickly and gain a significant competitive edge.

In another case, orchestration helped a client reduce their alert queues by 93%. By automating the initial stages of risk assessment, their analysts could focus their expertise on the small fraction of high-risk cases that truly required manual investigation.

The key outcomes include:

• Accelerated Time to Revenue: Clients can transact more quickly, resulting in faster revenue generation.
• Reduced Operational Costs: Automation frees up employees from manual tasks, lowering overhead and improving productivity.
• Improved Client Experience: A fast, seamless, and digital-first onboarding process fosters client trust and loyalty from the outset.
• Enhanced Compliance and Risk Management: Automated data validation and centralized oversight reduce the risk of errors and ensure consistent application of policies.

As Yetunde Ekunwe states, this transformation is not optional. For financial institutions hoping to thrive, it is "an absolute must because if you don't, you fall behind. And when you fall behind, you become obsolete."

Start Your Transformation Journey

Embarking on a digital transformation journey can seem daunting, particularly for large and complex organizations. Ekunwe advises a structured approach: understand the problem, define your goals, ensure consistency across the enterprise, and measure outcomes with clear KPIs, such as time to transact.

While a full transformation can take time, the initial impact of an orchestration strategy can be seen in as little as 15 to 24 months. The key is to start with a clear vision, secure executive buy-in, and partner with technology that can provide a scalable, data-driven solution.

By shifting your focus from manual processes to intelligent data orchestration, you can break down internal silos, eliminate friction, and deliver the modern, efficient client experience that today's market demands.

Learn How to Accelerate Your Time to Value

The insights shared here are just the beginning. The full webinar discussion provides a deeper dive into building a framework for digital transformation, measuring the ROI of orchestration, and balancing enterprise-wide goals with team-specific needs.

Watch the full webinar: Beyond Compliance: Transforming Client Experience Through Intelligent Data to learn how orchestration reduces friction and accelerates time to value for your organization.