Fixing Visibility Issues in Commercial Banking Onboarding & Servicing Operations

What are visibility issues in banking operations? Operational visibility in commercial banking refers to a shared, real-time view of customer journey progress across teams, systems and third-party partners during onboarding and ongoing servicing processes.

The single largest bottleneck in commercial banking operations is not a lack of work, but a lack of certainty about customer status because no system provides an end-to-end view of the journey. Teams are completing steps, vendors are processing requests and customers are submitting information and documents. These related workflows are running independently, yet they are highly dependent on one other.

Banking Complexity Clouds Operational Visibility

Banking products and services are naturally complex with many moving parts. As institutions scale up additional products and new compliance requirements come into play, operational complexity increases even more. That further clouds the view banks have, and fragments journey execution as more roles have to be involved.

Lack of transparency in customer journeys is not a tooling failure. It is a structural consequence of how commercial banking operations are organized.

Onboarding and Servicing Handoffs Lead to Visibility Breakdowns

Commercial banking operations routinely contain handoffs between different teams, inside and outside the bank. They are heavily dependent on third parties that fulfill parts of the journey. The steps criss-cross between:

Sales and relationship management
Operations and implementation teams
Risk and compliance
External providers and vendors
Customers and channels

Each participant sees only their portion of the process, whether it’s an onboarding or activation journey or a support conversation. Progress is often assumed, with teams completing their portion of the work and then handing it off to another team or vendor. In that gap, or the in-between, there is no obvious owner, and that leads to a lack of accountability and clarity.

There is no single view that shows:

What step or task has been completed
What is in progress right now
What is waiting for action and by whom
Who is responsible for moving past the obstacle to progress the process to the next step

This chaos is an accidental by-product of a bank’s structure, which traditionally optimizes by functional areas and not with an eye to end-to-end customer experiences. This is especially understandable since each department has different responsibilities and goals they focus on.

Banks that can unlock and leverage their data horizontally hold a natural edge. - PwC

How Do Third-Party Vendors and the Business Ecosystem Contribute to Visibility Problems?

Visibility is lacking in the business ecosystem during onboarding and servicing because information is not natively shared across the bank and third-party participants.

Commercial banking operations are heavily reliant on third-party providers, like payment processors, card networks, treasury platforms, hardware providers and compliance services. A typical bank’s business ecosystem can include hundreds or even thousands of third-party vendors helping it deliver financial products.

Third-party partners typically:

Maintain their own systems and data
Report the status through portals or emails
Do not expose real-time detail to the bank

And yet, because it’s a bank-offered product, the bank is rightly held responsible for the experience during every interaction. The problem is they don’t control every interaction. And worse, they often know nothing about those interactions when a customer contacts them. It’s a black hole, and they are flying in the dark.

If a customer contacts them about an experience with a vendor partner during onboarding or servicing, they have to reach out to troubleshoot the issue, communicate it to the customer and ensure everyone is on the same page. This is high effort, and can lead to time lags and errors. It’s not uncommon for banking teams to wait in a partner’s phone queue to get news on what’s happening with their own customer and bank product!

“Focusing your cost and transformation efforts around the customer is a good idea, but it must be done with an enterprise view looking end-to-end at the customer experience and expectations. If you are just introducing a bunch of individual point solutions, you may be scoring wins in siloes, but you are probably not delivering on your overall cost, operational or customer objectives.”
- Sara Forbes Partner, Advisory Transformation Services, KPMG in the UK

Why Are Visibility Problems In Banking Operations So Hard to Fix?

Sometimes, the methods banks use to solve visibility problems that come up while supporting customers lead to more visibility problems because they add new processes and people to the mix. Some of the ways banks add more complications are:

Create additional reports
Increase the cadence of status meetings
Assign additional project coordinators
Start tracking more details in reports

These efforts can help, but they also add more human effort without solving the core problem: CX synchronization within the bank and outside it. The effort to maintain this amped-up surveillance can require more effort than the work itself.

Why More Communication Doesn't Fully Solve Visibility Gaps?

Visibility goes beyond communication. In fact, in many banks, work is moving and communication is happening; it’s just not being shared seamlessly across the ecosystem in near real-time. This is one of the reasons orchestration layers have emerged as core infrastructure for banks.

Without a centralized data layer that connects all CX interactions in a journey in one view as they happen:

Decisions are made with limited information or cannot be made at all
Risks remain hidden in between steps where ownership is unclear
Customer experience is inconsistent
Operational costs increase due to inefficient manual workarounds and status chasing

This is why visibility gaps are found in even high-performing financial institutions.

Banking’s infrastructure and organization are still optimized for vertical scale, not horizontal speed. That structure is now a liability.

What is the Financial Cost of Poor Visibility in Commercial Banking?

There is no single metric that defines poor visibility, but its impact can be tracked across three major categories: operational inefficiency, transformation delay, and increased risk.

1. Operational and Support Costs

Manual updates, like email, back-and-forth meetings, phone queues and spreadsheets, used to capture and then communicate customer journey status, is human intensive, and therefore, expensive.

Elevated Support Costs and Stress: Customer escalations, especially late in the journey, require high-touch attention to ensure the relationship is retained.
Customer Churn: A customer may leave even before using the product they signed up for. In OvationCXM’s commercial banking research, we discovered 25% of commercial customers have quit onboarding and moved to another option out of frustration.
Greater Surveillance Efforts: Additional monitoring steps, like detailed tracking or more frequent check-ins, add more time and resources, contributing to further drag on operational expenses and sometimes, even more headcount.

2. Delayed Digital Transformation

The lack of transparency occurs almost by accident - it is just the symptom of a highly complex banking structure that is siloed and fragmented. This disconnected business infrastructure blocks an institution’s ability to modernize and scale and take advantage of innovation.

Delayed Tech Initiatives: 43% of bank executives report delays in strategic projects due to the complexity of integration and the lack of a clear return on investment (ROI).
Trapped Value: The inability to connect data across products, customers, and markets means valuable insights—which should fuel real-time risk decisions and personalized engagement—remain trapped behind product-aligned architectures and compliance silos.

3. Structural Cost of Siloed Data

Banks are organized around functional areas. The result is system fragmentation and data siloes. On average, a bank maintains 10-15 separate core systems that don’t communicate with each other, so teams work with only partial updates. These data gaps and quality issues hinder the rate of growth.

Ultimately, the financial cost of poor visibility is the sum of increased internal support costs, lost customer relationships and revenue, and the inability to embrace innovations like artificial intelligence, which require clean, abundant customer data to provide ROI.

Why is There Urgency to Overcome Visibility Blockers in Banking?

In commercial banking, operational visibility directly affects:

Internal cost
Time to onboard, activation and first transaction
Support volume and costs
Customer satisfaction and confidence

As banks embrace automation, they can’t rely solely on human coordination of customer experiences if they want to scale up operations.

Understanding visibility as an operational constraint—not a communication failure—is the first step toward addressing execution breakdowns across commercial banking operations.