IHS Markit Debuts Client Onboarding Tool

London-based data and technology provider IHS Markit has released its Onboarding Accelerator, aimed at slashing the average time required in the client onboarding process

Onboarding Accelerator will be an add-on feature to its existing Counterparty Manager product, which serves as a document hub used by 12,000 buy-side customers and more than 150 brokers, dealers and other financial services providers to upload tax, credit, and know-your-customer (KYC) documents.

“Clients don’t really know where the account is in the process right now when they send it across,” says Brittany Garland, director for product management at IHS Markit. “[Now] they’ll know just from looking at the dashboard, my account passed KYC, passed the credit review, passed the tax review, and it can now go to the legal department to reach an agreement.”

If there is a hang-up in the onboarding process, the tool will allow both parties to know immediately at which stage and which document or data point caused the error, as well as track where their documents are in the review process.

“People are physically following up with each other, or go back and forth over email,” says Garland. “There’s an extraordinary amount of manhours that are being spent on manual communication, data, and documentation.” 

As it stands, a lack of uniformity and continually changing requirements plagues onboarding and draws the process out to an average of 40 days. Garland hopes to reduce that time frame to one day. 

“I think when we get to a place where systems are connected to other systems, [and] where we have the full connectivity between maybe a client’s internal system and a bank’s internal system, if all those requirements are met, we’ll be doing exception-based processing,” says Garland. “For certain accounts and products, then yes, we can get down to one day. For the more complex requests that are going to require a further level of due diligence, then those will pop out, and then you can have your resources spend their time on those.”

IHS Markit plans to roll out new features for the platform this summer.

“We want to work toward a place where we’re providing a digitized institutional identity, while also enabling system-to-system communication for the onboarding and other KYC processes,” she adds.