.svg)
Introduction
Most commercial banks do not typically manage the onboarding of their products through a single system.
Instead, onboarding is tracked across a patchwork of emails, spreadsheets, internal tools, and third-party portals owned by separate teams and functional areas. This approach evolved incrementally, almost accidentally, as banks kept pace with competition and customer demands. As they add new products and services, these offerings often require more intricate journeys, as well as additional vendors and teams to fulfill delivery.
Status Quo Vs. Modern Onboarding
The status quo has worked adequately, but not exceptionally, to manage onboarding. Yes, customers are onboarded, but the cost is high. Manual processes and handoffs are inefficient. Communication gaps and stalled steps get missed. Coordination between parties is time-consuming and high-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 product onboarding becomes more complex, requiring inputs from different departments as well as vendor partners, these process management methods simply can’t scale. The result becomes ongoing delays, lack of transparency and clarity about where a customer sits in a journey and who is responsible for the next steps. That confusion translates into an increase in customer support requests to discover what’s happening with their onboarding.
If commercial clients can’t find information or receive support fast enough, a significant number will give up commercial banking customers to give up altogether. Then, the bank’s acquisition cost never turns into a live customer. Understanding how banks currently track onboarding workflows today is a smart first step to understanding why onboarding timelines stretch out and collaboration becomes difficult.
How Commercial Bank Onboarding Is Typically Tracked
In most banks, onboarding is a series of processes that are dependent on one another. This sequence of steps is distributed across different functional teams and systems. Usually, they don’t have a shared source of truth about the end-to-end journey they are part of. Common tracking methods include:
Email threads
Email remains a primary coordination tool for onboarding activities. Teams use email to:
- Request documents
- Confirm task completion
- Ask partners for updates
- Escalate delays
- Communicate exceptions and ask questions
As onboarding progresses, email threads multiply, forwarding chains grow and critical context gets buried in the inboxes of those working the journey. That knowledge isn’t universally accessible to everyone in the ecosystem. Teams know what's happening with their specific 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
These spreadsheets must be:
- Manually updated
- Maintained and shared by the owner
- Different for each product or business line
When spreadsheets fall out of sync, someone goes on vacation or updates are done as time allows, no one knows with certainty what's happening in a client’s journey or if there’s a problem.
CRM Systems Used as Workarounds
Some banks try to leverage systems they have for other purposes to track onboarding, even though they were never designed for that function. CRMs like Salesforce are designed to track and update sales activity, not to monitor and advance multi-party execution that happens both inside and outside the bank.
What happens when CRMs are used for 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
Leveraging a CRM for a function it’s not built for complicates service delivery. It adds time, cost and reliance on tech expertise, while leaving the underlying problem untouched - chaotic, fragmented journeys across ecosystems that are not tracked in one place.
Vendor and Partner Portals
Third-party providers—such as payment processors, card networks, fraud services, or treasury platforms maintain their own onboarding portals, too.
Banks must:
- Log in to multiple systems
- Check status manually
- Translate vendor progress into internal updates
These portals rarely connect.
Tribal Knowledge and Handoffs
In many cases, onboarding updates are tracked by:
- A relationship manager
- A project coordinator
- A single operations lead
Status is not documented anywhere, so when ownership changes, relationship managers leave or workloads increase, the knowledge can be difficult to track down, or worse, totally lost.
Since banks are always competing with one another to win coveted commercial customers, a breakdown in service due to knowledge and communication gaps can lead customers to move elsewhere.
Where Manual Methods Break Down
Manual tracking methods fail in predictable ways during onboarding.
Fragmented Systems Cause Zero 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 themselves are left in the dark.
Delayed Reporting Means Stalls Are Discovered Too Late
Because updates rely on manual reporting and not real-time updates, stalled journeys are often identified only after:
- A customer complains
- A deadline is missed
- A deal stalls post-approval
Time to activation or first transaction becomes unnecessarily delayed, pushing back revenue realization.
Ownership of Each Step is Unclear
When onboarding spans multiple teams and partners, responsibility may be unclear.
Questions like:
- “Who owns this step?”
- “Who is waiting on whom?”
- “What happens next?”
- “Who reached out or communicated last?”
Without one source of truth, it can be hard to answer those questions and service the customer effectively.
Customers Become the Coordination Layer
If visibility isn’t proactive or available in real time, customers frequently:
- Call for status updates: The research shows more than 50% of commercial customers have to reach out 2-3 times during onboarding for help.
- Forward documents multiple times: 92% of businesses report having to repeat their information across multiple departments when trying to solve a single issue.
- Act as messengers between teams: When they contact customer support, customers default to becoming the alert to onboarding issues.
This increases support costs, slows progress of the onboarding and erodes trust early in the banking relationship.
Why Incremental Onboarding Fixes Don’t Work
Adding to the challenge is that banks have added point solutions or procedures to track onboarding. While these efforts help in specific functional areas of the onboarding process, they rarely solve the end-to-end journey problem.
Tool Sprawl Increases Fragmentation
Introducing another tool can complicate journeys further, making it:
- Another place to update the status
- Another login to check
- Another integration to maintain
- Another silo that holds customer information not fully shared
Without a single place to view everything, journeys become more complex and more disconnected rather than smoother and faster.
Workflow Automation Stops at System Boundaries
Workflow and business automation tools are effective within a single platform, process or team. However, commercial banking product onboarding is a sequence of different processes that rely heavily on partners to fulfill specific steps, which require a holistic view of the full journey.
Manual Oversight Won’t Scale
Assigning someone to project manage does help 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 onboarding problem remains.
How Leading Banks Are Rethinking Onboarding Coordination
To solve the onboarding challenge explored above, top banks are adopting Banking Onboarding Orchestration. Banks that consistently shorten onboarding timelines and make them seamless transform an operational process into a profit driver.
Rather than treating onboarding as a collection of mandatory tasks, leading financial institutions manage it as a single, managed CX-focused journey even though it spans functionally 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
Banking onboarding orchestration is delivered ideally through a coordination layer that connects every person and platform involved without replacing existing systems. Onboarding orchestration, in fact, should connect these vital, existing systems so they can continue to function as they were designed while unlocking the data and steps within them.
You can learn more about this approach in our overview of Banking Onboarding Orchestration.
Revenue Impact on Onboarding
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. Understanding today’s reality makes it easier to see why orchestration has become necessary - not as another tool, but as 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: How do most commercial banks currently track product onboarding?
A: Most commercial banks track onboarding using a patchwork of email threads, spreadsheets, CRM systems used as workarounds, separate vendor portals, and reliance on unwritten "tribal knowledge."
Q: What is the main problem with using CRMs, spreadsheets or other traditional methods to track onboarding?
A: Tools like email threads, spreadsheets and CRMs are not built to manage complex onboarding processes that span different organizations and technologies, so they require significant human effort and they are rarely updated in real time. Updates must still be chased before documents or emails can be updated, so if someone is out of the office or left the bank, that knowledge can be locked up. The status quo is highly manual, making it almost impossible to scale well.
Q: What is banking orchestration and how does it solve onboarding problems?
A: Banking onboarding orchestration visualizes onboarding as a single, coordinated journey, even though it spans separate departments and technologies. It solves chaos in delivering commercial bank products and services by connecting existing but siloed systems, teams and communication channels. It unifies and then unlocks that information and the related journey progress so it's visible to everyone in real time. Since friction that stalls product go-lives usually happen in between handoffs between organizations and systems, seeing everything in one place allows banks to guide the journey and solve issues earlier.
.png)
