Fenergo’s solution helped ensure reduced labour-intensive tasks, elimination of waiting times, and potential for migration to other business areas, among a host of other benefits.
-IBS Intelligence

A solid step towards its endeavor to become the “bank of the future”, one that continually addresses clients’ ever-evolving needs in an increasingly digital world, Bank ABC (incorporated as Arab Banking Corporation B.S.C) set out to transform a fundamental component of its client experience journey: the onboarding process.

Merging cutting edge technologies with agile methodologies, Bank ABC launched the MENA region’s first fully digital corporate onboarding service in August 2021, with a roadmap to deploy it across the bank’s global network by Q1 2022.

Bank ABC is an international bank headquartered in the Kingdom of Bahrain with a presence spanning 15 countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia. The bank, which provides services such as Trade Finance, Treasury, Project & Structured Finance, Syndications, Corporate & Institutional Banking, as well as Islamic Banking, wanted to deliver a seamless, self-service corporate onboarding solution, reducing processing time to just several hours.

Fenergo is a digital enabler of client and regulatory technology for financial services. It provides Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) software solutions for financial institutions.

Counting more than 80 global financial institutions as clients, its award-winning CLM suite digitally transforms how financial institutions manage clients throughout their lifecycle, from onboarding to know your customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) and regulatory compliance to offboarding.

Project and Solution Overview

The bank envisioned to implement a solution that helped to:

• Digitise the onboarding process and minimise customer touchpoints and human intervention.
• Deliver an intuitive, flexible and effortless digital experience through a user-friendly self-service solution, thus enabling client lifecycle management.
• Implement a scalable solution across Bank ABC’s global network.
• Offer real-time connectivity – anytime/anywhere/any device access for users and corporate banking clients.
• Ensure client feedback was heard and continuously incorporated in the service.
• Improve compliance by meeting applicable regulatory requirements in all Bank ABC jurisdictions.

Bank ABC leveraged Fenergo’s technology to deliver a fully digital corporate onboarding service, enabling corporates and financial institutions to open an account anytime via any device, track their onboarding status in real-time and readily access the bank’s financial products and services.

Fenergo CLM enables financial institutions to deliver a faster, compliant, and digital customer experience while achieving a single client view across channels, products, business lines and jurisdictions. Hosted on AWS, Fenergo’s SaaS solution is a sophisticated workflow and case management solution that automates data collection for regulatory compliance and digitalises end-to-end client onboarding journeys. The rules-driven solution ensures compliance with multiple global and local regulatory frameworks, including AML, KYC, Tax (CRS, FATCA), OTC Derivatives (EMIR, Dodd-Frank, MiFID II, Margin Requirements) and data privacy rules (GDPR).

The solution also supports the collection, centralisation and sharing of client and counterparty data and documentation across the institution. It deploys an API-first approach for advanced integration with a host of external KYC, AML and entity data providers, and industry utilities to expedite compliance, improve operational efficiencies and enhance customer experience.

Implementation Process

With the agile nature of Fenergo SaaS, implementation for the first unit in the bank took just four months. The strategic principles which facilitated rapid deployment include:

API first: All business logic was implemented in a consistently consumable, secure RESTful API to support the re-use of features and functionality across many users with minimum implementation time.

Configuration first: Features were delivered with tooling to configure and then install; no feature was released until tooling existed for it. This was accompanied by industry-approved model bank accelerators to fast-track implementation.

Benefits Achieved

Bank ABC’s digital onboarding service enables corporate and financial institution clients to open an account within a few hours, eliminating lengthy waiting times required for traditional methods. It also offers a single-client-view, enabling the bank to effectively utilise customer data for rapid and streamlined delivery of financial products.

Replacing complex manual processes, the digital onboarding solution automated KYC, AML and regulatory compliance steps whilst enabling the bank to grow its global customer base by offering a faster, simplified and connected onboarding journey. During periodic KYC reviews, both prospective and existing clients could effortlessly input the required data and documentation. The solution also embedded a digital identification and verification tool, utilising AI and biometric scans.

Furthermore, Bank ABC integrated Fenergo’s CLM with its core banking system via a meta-layer as well as screening and data providers. This enables the bank to leverage publicly-available data, reduces the need for repeated client information requests and labour-intensive manual entries, delivering a frictionless customer onboarding experience.

In addition to transforming client experience, this self-service onboarding solution enables the bank to utilise skilled resources more effectively, empowering employees to focus on value creation initiatives while meeting clients’ business needs.

The features of Fenergo’s SaaS solution were delivered with tooling to enable self-service drag-and-drop configuration for faster implementation. In the long-term, the technology may be migrated to the bank’s other business areas, deployed across its global network spanning countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Conclusion

As part of a comprehensive group-wide digital transformation program, Bank ABC leveraged pioneering technologies to deliver the first fully digital corporate onboarding service in the MENA region. This led it to adopt Fenergo’s SaaS solution to transform its internal processes, resulting in a faster onboarding process and enhanced client experience.

The adaptability and flexibility of Fenergo’s technology enabled the bank to scale the digital onboarding solution in accordance with relevant regulatory policy changes. This was further supported by Fenergo’s breadth of regulatory coverage in 120 jurisdictions as well as its community-based product development model. Fenergo’s community approach enabled it to rapidly respond to regulatory policy changes, whereby clients contributed to the solution roadmap, which enabled it to understand the specific regulatory needs of financial institutions.

Key Facts

Client: Bank ABC
Founded: 1980
Headquarters: Kingdom of Bahrain
Supplier: Fenergo
Founded: 2009
Headquarters: Ireland
Solution: Fenergo SaaS Client Lifecycle Management (CLM)
Timeline: Go-live in July 2021