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OvationCXM is an orchestration platform for banks and other regulated industries. It coordinates onboarding work that is spread across teams, systems and third-party partners, so operations and business line leaders can see where every client stands without relying on spreadsheets and email threads.
Introduction
Most commercial banks do not manage product onboarding through a single system. Instead, onboarding is tracked across a patchwork of emails, spreadsheets, internal tools and third-party portals owned by separate teams. This approach evolved incrementally, almost accidentally, as banks kept pace with competitors and customer demands. Each new product or service brings more intricate journeys, and more vendors and teams to deliver them.
This article is written for bank operations teams who live in that patchwork every day, and for the business line leaders who depend on onboarding to turn a won client into revenue.
Status Quo Vs. Modern Onboarding
The status quo has worked adequately, but not exceptionally. Customers do get onboarded, but the cost is high. Manual processes and handoffs are inefficient, communication gaps and stalled steps get missed, and coordinating between parties takes time and effort.
A quarter of commercial banking customers have walked away in frustration without completing onboarding, according to OvationCXM research into the perceptions of commercial banking customers. Cost confusion, missing information and communication gaps are named as the main problems.
As onboarding grows more complex, requiring input from multiple departments and vendor partners, these methods can't scale. The result is ongoing delay, little transparency into where a customer sits in the journey, and no clarity on who owns the next step. That confusion drives more support requests from customers trying to find out what's happening.
When commercial clients can't find information or get support fast enough, some give up altogether. The bank's acquisition cost then never turns into a live customer. Understanding how banks track onboarding today is the first step to understanding why timelines stretch out and collaboration gets difficult.
How do banks track commercial onboarding today?
In most banks, onboarding is a series of dependent processes distributed across functional teams and systems, usually with no shared source of truth for the end-to-end journey. Common tracking methods include the following.
Email threads
Email remains a primary coordination tool. Teams use it to:
- Request documents
- Confirm task completion
- Ask partners for updates
- Escalate delays
- Communicate exceptions and ask questions
As onboarding progresses, threads multiply, forwarding chains grow and critical context gets buried in individual inboxes. Teams know what's happening with their own task, but not with the journey overall.
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are frequently used as project management tools to:
- Track onboarding status
- List required steps
- Record completion dates
- Assign owners
They must be updated manually, maintained and shared by their owner, and are usually different for each product or business line. When they fall out of sync, someone goes on vacation or updates happen only as time allows, no one knows with certainty what's happening in a client's journey or whether there's a problem.
CRM Systems Used as Workarounds
Some banks use systems they already have to track onboarding, even though those systems were never designed for it. CRMs like Salesforce are built to track sales activity, not to monitor and advance multi-party execution that happens both inside and outside the bank.
When a CRM is stretched into journey orchestration:
- Custom objects are created
- Fields are overloaded
- Manual updates are required to show progress
- IT must build custom code to force the CRM to do what's needed
This adds time, cost and reliance on technical expertise, while leaving the underlying problem untouched: fragmented journeys across an ecosystem that is not tracked in one place.
Vendor and partner portals
Third-party providers such as payment processors, card networks, fraud services and treasury platforms maintain their own onboarding portals. Banks must log in to multiple systems, check status manually, and translate vendor progress into internal updates. These portals rarely connect.
Tribal knowledge and handoffs
In many cases, onboarding status lives with a relationship manager, a project coordinator or a single operations lead. It isn't documented anywhere, so when ownership changes, people leave or workloads increase, that knowledge can be hard to track down or lost entirely.
Banks compete fiercely for commercial customers, and a service breakdown caused by knowledge and communication gaps can send a client elsewhere.
Why do email and spreadsheets fail for bank onboarding?
Manual tracking fails in predictable ways.
Fragmented systems mean no end-to-end visibility
Each team sees only its portion of the process. There is no consolidated view showing:
- Where the customer is in the journey
- Which steps are complete
- What is blocked or waiting on external action
Leadership lacks real-time insight into progress or risk, and customers are left in the dark.
Delayed reporting means stalls are discovered too late
Because updates depend on manual reporting rather than real-time signals, stalled journeys are often found only after:
- A customer complains
- A deadline is missed
- A deal stalls post-approval
Time to activation or first transaction is delayed, pushing back revenue.
Ownership of each step is unclear
When onboarding spans multiple teams and partners, responsibility blurs. Common questions include:
- "Who owns this step?"
- "Who is waiting on whom?"
- "What happens next?"
- "Who reached out or communicated last?"
Without one source of truth, they're hard to answer, and the customer is harder to serve.
Customers become the coordination layer
When visibility isn't proactive or available in real time, customers step in to fill the gap:
- They call for status updates. The research shows that 52% of commercial customers have to reach out 2-3 times during onboarding for help.
- They repeat themselves. 92% of businesses report having to repeat their information across multiple departments when trying to solve a single issue.
- They act as messengers between teams. When they contact support, customers become the alert system for onboarding issues.
This raises support costs, slows onboarding and erodes trust early in the relationship.
Why Don't Incremental Onboarding Fixes Solve the Problem?
Banks have added point solutions and procedures to track onboarding. These help in specific areas but rarely solve the end-to-end journey problem.
Tool sprawl increases fragmentation
Each new tool is another place to update status, another login to check, another integration to maintain, and another silo holding customer information that isn't fully shared. Without a single place to see everything, journeys get more disconnected, not faster.
Workflow automation stops at system boundaries
Workflow and business automation tools work well within a single platform, process or team. Commercial onboarding, however, is a sequence of different processes that rely heavily on partners for specific steps, and it needs a holistic view of the full journey.
Manual oversight won't scale
Assigning a project manager helps in the short term, but as volumes grow:
- Bottlenecks reappear
- Institutional knowledge becomes a risk
- Costs rise linearly with throughput
- It still relies on human labor and constant monitoring
The underlying problem remains.
What is onboarding orchestration, and how does it work?
Leading banks are adopting banking onboarding orchestration: a coordination layer that connects every person and platform involved in onboarding, without replacing existing systems. Banks that consistently shorten onboarding timelines turn an operational process into a revenue driver.
Rather than treating onboarding as a collection of mandatory tasks, these institutions manage it as a single, CX-focused journey, even though it spans separate departments and technologies. At a high level, orchestration involves:
- Defining onboarding as a structured, end-to-end process
- Digitally templating the core sequence, with room to customize
- Making progress visible to all participants
- Managing handoffs explicitly rather than informally
- Detecting friction and delays early, not after escalation
Existing systems keep working as designed, while orchestration unlocks the data and steps inside them.
How orchestration differs from the tools banks already use
- CRM (for example, Salesforce): manages sales relationships and activity. Orchestration manages multi-party execution after the sale.
- Contact center platforms (for example, NICE or Genesys): manage customer conversations and service interactions. Orchestration manages the operational work behind them.
- Digital banking platforms (for example, Backbase): deliver the customer-facing experience. Orchestration coordinates the internal and partner steps that experience depends on.
- Workflow automation: automates tasks within one system or team. Orchestration spans the systems, teams and partners between them.
Learn more in our overview of Banking Onboarding Orchestration.
What this means for operations and business line leaders
For operations teams, orchestration replaces status-chasing with a shared view: who owns each step, what's blocked, and what's waiting on a partner. Fewer inbox searches and spreadsheet updates, fewer surprises.
For business line leaders, it makes onboarding predictable. You can see which new clients are stalled before they escalate, which steps slow time to revenue, and where the process is putting relationships at risk.
How does onboarding speed affect time to revenue?
How banks track onboarding directly affects:
- Time to revenue
- Customer satisfaction
- Support costs
- Operational risk
As banking ecosystems grow more complex, manual tracking methods that once worked become liabilities. Orchestration isn't another tool to log into. It's a way to manage execution across the entire onboarding journey.
FAQ: Tracking Bank Onboarding
Q: What are the main reasons a commercial client abandons bank onboarding?
A: Findings from the OvationCXM Business Banking CX Report, identified the top onboarding frustrations of commercial banking customers during onboarding (ranked in order):
1) Cost was different than expected 2) Confusing instructions 3) Unclear process and next steps 4) Couldn't find needed information 5) Too many people and organizations involved. To that end, 52% of businesses needed 2-3 contacts with the bank to get help while onboarding a bank product.
Q: What is the main problem with using CRMs, spreadsheets or email to track onboarding?These tools aren't built to manage onboarding that spans different organizations and technologies. A: They take significant human effort and are rarely updated in real time. Updates must be chased, and if someone is out of the office or leaves the bank, their knowledge goes with them. The status quo is highly manual and hard to scale.
Q: Can a CRM properly orchestrate bank onboarding?
A: A CRM can be stretched to, but it was built to track sales activity. Using it for multi-party onboarding typically means custom objects, overloaded fields, manual progress updates and IT-built code, without giving anyone a true end-to-end view. Anytime an onboarding change occurs, it requires new custom code which can involve slow implementation and costs.
Q: How is orchestration different from a workflow tool or case management?
A: Orchestration is different from a workflow tool or case management because it threads together and coordinates multiple workflows that may have a variety of steps that take place inside different organizations, teams and systems. It brings these steps into one workspace and a singular, visible journey that can be viewed from end to end. In contrast, a workflow tool optimizes a single process for a finite task. Case management, in contrast, manages the needs or concerns of a customer by capturing their request, ensuring it is in the queue and sent to the right person to resolve. It is also specific to a finite concern in time vs. a multi-step, multi-party journey.
Q: What is banking onboarding orchestration, and how does it solve onboarding problems?
A: Banking onboarding orchestration presents onboarding as a single, coordinated journey even though it spans separate departments and technologies. It connects existing but siloed systems, teams and communication channels, and makes journey progress visible to everyone in real time. Because friction that stalls go-lives usually happens in the handoffs between organizations and systems, seeing everything in one place lets banks guide the journey and resolve issues earlier.
Q: Who should own onboarding visibility inside the bank: operations or the business line?
A: Both need it. Operations needs it to manage handoffs and clear blockers. Business line leaders need it to protect relationships and time to revenue. A shared view means both work from the same information.
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