Research findings published by the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) revealed that six in 10 (57%) senior salespeople in banking spend more than 1.5 days of their week (27% of their working week) onboarding new client organizations.
The research surveyed over 100 senior salespeople in the banking sector in the UK, US and Germany.
In addition, 50% of financial institutions use, on average, four identifiers to help identify client organizations and the process takes, on average, six weeks. This length of time spent onboarding creates a significant burden as salespeople have less time to work on their core focuses, such as acquiring new business and servicing existing clients.
The findings form the basis for a new research report from GLEIF titled ‘A New Future for Legal Entity Identification’, in which GLEIF outlines its view that replacing disjointed information with a globally accepted approach based on broad adoption of the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) would remove complexity from business transactions and deliver quantifiable value to financial services firms.
The report as well as a separate document detailing the research findings are available for download on the GLEIF website.
The onboarding burden
Overall, the research results show that the onboarding process for new business relationships, including know your customer (KYC) due diligence, is too time-consuming and requires too much administration.
Other key findings include
57% of respondents agree that reliability of reference data is a challenge
55% of respondents agree that the resourcing of onboarding is a challenge
55% of respondents agree that lengthy processes mean risk of business loss
61% of respondents agree that digital technology will further complicate the process
In a globalized digital economy, verifying the identity of customers, partners and suppliers is becoming an increasingly complex
