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Podcast
Reimagining banking customer onboarding
From cost center to growth engine with Kyndryl's Agentic AI Framework
By Puja Prabhakar
Banks spend billions to acquire new customers. Yet too many applicants are lost at the very first touchpoint - onboarding.
Research shows that it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one1. With 38% of applicants abandoning the process if it takes too long2, that’s revenue lost before the relationship begins.
The onboarding imperative
Customer onboarding has become one of banking’s most critical and fragile moments. It sits at the intersection of compliance, cost, and customer experience. Banks must satisfy stringent Know Your Customer (KYC), Customer Due Diligence (CDD), and Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) requirements while providing a seamless, digital-first experience.
The reality, however, is that most banks still rely on manual, rule-based processes with data re-keyed across multiple disconnected systems. Approvals stretch into weeks, and armies of operations staff validate documents and cross-check lists. The result is ballooning costs, frustrated customers, and risk teams overwhelmed by noise rather than insight.
The urgency has never been greater. Regulators expect real-time explainability and audit-ready trails, with global Anti-Money Laundering fines against financial institutions totalling around $4.6B in 20243. Boards are pushing to reduce cost, improve customer experience, and increase Return on Tangible Equity (RoTE)4. That makes customer onboarding a priority. It must be cheaper to run, faster to complete and auditable.
Done right, onboarding moves from a compliance bottleneck to a driver of trust (transparent, explainable decisions), efficiency (straight-through processing, fewer touches), and growth (higher conversion, earlier revenue, stronger loyalty), especially as fintechs set expectations at minutes, not weeks.
A clunky onboarding process doesn’t just delay revenue; it signals from day one that the bank is built for yesterday. In a world where first impressions define loyalty, onboarding has become the frontline of competitiveness.
Changing the game
Our banking customer onboarding process is built on the Kyndryl’s Agentic AI Framework. It runs anywhere, integrates into your enterprise stack, and is secured by zero-trust, privacy-by-design with end-to-end auditability.
Here’s how it changes the game:
It orchestrates, secures and scales multiple AI agents, so data collection, KYC, CDD/EDD checks, risks and decisioning run as a single, adaptive journey instead of a patchwork of hand-offs across disconnected systems.
An automated intake that learns your code, policies, data interdependencies and business goals grounding agents in your control environment from day one ensuring every action is policy-aligned and audit-ready.
Real-time, explainable risk adjusted to customer profile, behaviours and regulatory change driving straight-through processing for low-risk customers and escalating true exceptions to experts while providing audit-ready rationale for model governance.
Secure-by-design guardrails enforce policy and block unsafe actions and human oversight handles exceptions. Together they deliver transparent, compliant and explainable outcomes.
Integration with Kyndryl Bridge provides cross-estate telemetry (SLAs, false-positive rates and queue health), turning onboarding into a measurable, continuously improving system.
By delivering an intuitive, manual-free experience, relationship managers are elevated from operators to trusted advisors.
The business impact
We are turning onboarding into a strategic lever, and not just a faster process, using Kyndryl’s Agentic AI Framework. Done right, it has the potential to deliver:
- Low cost, fewer errors: Agents pre-populate the required information from trusted sources (Companies House, credit bureaus, sanctions/adverse media) and keep records in sync across systems, eliminating re-keying and rework.
- Faster, trusted journeys: Orchestrated, role-aware agents tailor journeys for retail, wealth and corporate onboarding, handling complexity without slowing simple cases, cutting cycle times from weeks to days, even hours.
- Stronger, explainable compliance: Real-time risk scoring, drives straight-through processing for low-risk customers and escalates only what matters, with full auditability for model governance and better fraud detection.
- From Pilot to P&L: Built for scale, our method and tooling breaks PoC purgatory and lands improvements in days, speeding conversion, unlocking lifetime value sooner.
For banks under pressure to reduce cost-income ratios and increase RoTE, this is exactly the kind of dual-impact initiatives that deliver both efficiency and growth.
The leadership imperative
The decision facing leaders is no longer if to act, but how fast. First movers will set the new standard for onboarding in financial services, turning a compliance obligation into a competitive advantage. Those that wait will not only miss efficiency gains but will also risk losing the customer confidence and loyalty.
At Kyndryl, we’re already helping financial institutions transform due diligence and client journeys with agentic AI. If you’d like to see what this looks like in practice, we’d be delighted to walk you through a demo and explore how these capabilities can be applied to your business.
Puja Prabhakar, Vice President, Partner, Consult Partner
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Sources
- Success in Digital Onboarding Requires More Than Just Speed and Convenience, The Financial Brand, April 2025
- Global Insights from Experian, Experian, 2024
- Bank & FI AML/Sanctions Fines & Penalties in the 21st Century, Financial Crime News, February 2025
- Global Banking Annual Review 2024: Attaining escape velocity, McKinsey, October 2024
