5 Ways Intelligent Agreement Management Scales Client Experiences for Wealth Management Firms

Affluent households are an attractive and growing market for wealth services. McKinsey projects that the number of U.S. households with at least $500,000 in investable assets will grow 4-5% per year opens in a new tab, compared with just 0.6% for the overall U.S. population.

Yet, many wealth management firms lack the necessary tools, staffing, and resources to serve the needs of this expanding market effectively. 

This situation won’t improve anytime soon.

To simply maintain the status quo, firms will need to increase productivity by 10 to 20% opens in a new tab and attract new talent to the industry more quickly. 

To counteract these trends and serve the needs of today’s affluent investor, wealth management firms need to take a new tack. The key is to reduce the amount of manual, paper-intensive administrative work that takes up much of advisors’ time, to the detriment of client engagement and growth. 

5 ways to achieve greater efficiency and better client experiences

Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) streamlines wealth management tasks, removing friction so your advisors can focus on what matters most: your clients.

Here are five ways you can deliver outstanding client experiences while eliminating manual rework and supporting firm growth:

1. How to simplify client onboarding with interactive digital experiences

Today’s affluent households expect more hands-on guidance from their financial advisors; the proportion of investors seeking more holistic advice grew from 29% in 2018 to 52% in 2023 opens in a new tab.

Onboarding is typically the first significant interaction an advisor has with a new client, so it’s a critical point for establishing trust.  But it’s also typically tedious and paper-intensive.

With Connected Third-Party Forms,* you’ll get access to the latest library of standardized custodian forms, seamlessly integrated into onboarding workflows within the Docusign interface. This reduces the time advisors spend locating the latest forms and ensuring that data fields are accurately aligned. It also reduces the need for data reentry and helps minimize the rates of not-in-good-order (NIGO) forms—documents that are incomplete, inaccurate, or improperly prepared. As a result, advisors are freed up to spend more time getting to know their new clients and their needs.

*Connected Third-Party Forms is expected later in 2026. 

2. Establish a single, secure hub to streamline tasks and foster collaboration

Lastly, providing advisors with a centralized agreement hub to manage all their relationships is the key to achieving streamlined, worry-free client engagement.

Docusign Workspaces is a single, secure hub that enables multi‑step client transactions with real‑time status and improved collaboration. It simplifies and accelerates the client agreement experience, reducing rework and time to completion by organizing all transaction steps within a dedicated home.

Workspaces also helps to ensure locked-down security, authenticating participants and maintaining access control so only authorized users can view sensitive content. It enhances collaboration by keeping all the correct participants, documents, and data in one place with role-based access. And it accelerates the end-to-end agreement process by consolidating and organizing multi-step transactions within a single workspace. 

3. Reducing advisor rework via real-time data validation

NIGO documents are a real headache for advisors. They affect data quality, compliance, and productivity, and can harm the client experience.

That’s why it’s important to have a consistent, repeatable data validation process integrated with your client onboarding workflows. Docusign Data Verification provides real‑time data validation that can lower NIGO rates and minimize rework.

Docusign validates signer‑entered data (e.g., email, phone, address, tax identification number, or bank account number) in real time. Data Verification also reduces risk through built-in auditability, recording verification events and results in the envelope history and providing a Certificate of Completion.

With out-of-the-box functionality and built-in integration with partner applications, Data Verification is easy to deploy—no lengthy implementation period is needed to start eliminating manual data checks. The solution also offers Custom Data Verification, allowing you to validate data against your firm’s internal sources of truth and enforce “must verify to sign” requirements when appropriate.

4. Support compliance and reduce friction with risk-based identity checks

Regulatory compliance is a critical piece of any client relationship. Wealth management is a heavily regulated industry, and your firm must ensure that all agreements, disclosures, and actions comply with the law. But it doesn’t need to be a dealbreaker 

Focus on embedding compliance into your workflows wherever possible to reduce friction and enhance the client experience. 

A good place to start is with Docusign’s Identify portfolio of identity verification solutions. Fully embedded into the signing flow, our mobile-first solutions verify the client's identity in real time without interrupting the process.

The portfolio includes several state-of-the-art client verification and authentication capabilities, including liveness (biometric) checks, automated document verification, one-time passwords, and risk-based verification, which escalates required checks only for higher-risk participants and transactions. Repeat clients can even set up a Docusign Wallet to accelerate completion times for future agreements that include an ID Verification component 

Purpose-built identity workflow configurations can be used to support specific compliance requirements, such as:

• Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2)

• New York’s “Title 23 NYCRR 500” requirements

• The EU’s Electronic Identification, Authentication, and Trust Services (eIDAS) regulation

Intuitive verification processes coupled with flexible recipient verification and authentication options help signers pass identity checks the first time, reducing drop‑outs. These options include:

• Document verification

• Biometric verification

• Phone Authentication

• Integrations with third-party identity providers (e.g., CLEAR, ID.me, Socure, etc.) to complete verification

• Apple Wallet integration  

In addition, Docusign Workflow Builder supports your firm’s specific compliance obligations by enabling you to add a dedicated process step that evaluates participant risk in real time. This enables wealth management firms to decouple intelligence and to orchestrate workflows based on live, automatically generated participant risk profiles rather than static assumptions. Because this functionality is seamlessly integrated into Workflow Builder, you can automatically capture all risk signals in ID Evidence, providing a unified audit trail for higher-level reviews and regulatory reporting.

5. Connect it all with standardized, reusable workflow templates

Inefficient manual workflows are a frequent cause of process missteps, errors, and wasted time. Advisors are drowning in paperwork.

This leaves many advisors feeling overworked and under-resourced, a situation that can be frustrating for clients, whether they’re onboarding with your firm or waiting for a response to an urgent inquiry.

Focus on providing your clients with a hassle-free experience by automating key steps across your workflows. This benefits both clients and advisors by accelerating the agreement process, reducing manual data entry and saving valuable time.

Using Workflow Builder, you can work smarter and faster with no-code, conditional workflows that route by signer type and eligibility, reducing errors and drop-offs. Workflow Builder’s reusable templates help standardize routine workflows at scale, eliminating point-to-point builds to reduce costs. The solution increases visibility by tracking actions across every process step, enabling you to identify and eliminate bottlenecks and critical fail points.

Meet the moment with Docusign

To successfully address a growing market opportunity in wealth services, advisory firms must streamline agreement workflows to enhance the client experience.

The IAM platform offers all the tools you need to streamline and automate client onboarding and servicing. By leveraging a single, unified platform that reduces friction, enhances workflows, and ensures airtight security and compliance, wealth management firms can meet the evolving needs of today’s affluent households and scale for the future.

Ready to improve operational efficiency and achieve faster time to revenue? Visit Docusign for Financial Services