ATB Financial is a full-service financial institution in Calgary, Alberta, with 5,375 employees (team members) and over 753,000 customers. Three of ATB’s key priorities are to transform banking, make banking work for people, and be the place to bank. With these priorities in mind, the company was committed to providing tools, technology & processes that would enable customer obsession, with a strong focus on team members managing customer relationships and growing deposits. One of the key opportunities ATB identified was the customer onboarding or account opening process. While the financial industry as a whole has seen an increase in the number of accounts opened, according to a 2014 survey conducted by Gallup, the process is painful for employees and customers alike.

At ATB, it would take 45 minutes or more on average, for an employee to enter all the required information into the systems to fully onboard a customer. This process allowed little time to listen and build relationships with our clients. And in research conducted by ATB’s consumer research team, customers complained the process took too long, and the experience was painful. If you consider ATB opened nearly 54,000 personal Canadian dollar deposit accounts in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2018 (FY18), that means team members spent almost 40,335 hours entering information into systems to open accounts.

Team members required a tool that made it easy to open an account. To be customer-obsessed, they also needed to be able to open accounts anytime, anywhere, with the confidence the customer record is compliant. What ATB delivered with Onboarding Express—a digital onboarding tool that streamlined the process for employees and decreased the application data entry, to provide
an opportunity for employees to deepen connections with customers—was what was required to solve this business problem.

This project had lots of visibility and attention from the ATB executive team as it was the first big initiative to be developed in-house by ATB’s Transformation department. It was also the first project to be deployed using the Agile methodology, where we would release a minimal viable product (MVP) on a wide-scale, and the solution would see continual iterations or improvements over time. The challenge to ‘improve the customer experience, by taking the customer onboarding process from 45 minutes down to under 10 minutes’ also came directly from ATB’s Chief Transformation Officer, Wellington Holbrook, after he spent more than 45 minutes with a family member opening a new account.

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