How Intelligent Agreement Management Can Solve the Top 4 Challenges in Banking

The evolution of consumer expectations has dramatically shifted the banking landscape. Banking customers favor tools that simplify and expedite their account opening and maintenance interactions, and banks must embrace new technologies that democratize customer onboarding and account maintenance. 

But first, it’s important to recognize that today’s banks face several challenging headwinds.

What are the top 4 challenges banks face?   

1. Achieving operational efficiency 

In recent research from BAI, banking leaders identified operational efficiency as a top-three business challenge. Disparate legacy systems and manual steps can inflate costs and inhibit straight-through processing, impacting productivity and time to revenue capture.

2. Providing personalized, mobile-first experiences 

Financial consumers expect access to mobile-first, "know-me" experiences, and are increasingly embracing AI to achieve them. For example, according to McKinsey, consumers would like their primary bank to offer AI tools to help provide a more personalized experience, and nearly all say they would eventually switch to another provider if their current bank didn’t keep up with this technological shift.

3. Managing growing regulatory compliance responsibilities

When manual systems don’t communicate effectively, it’s challenging to keep up with a rapidly changing regulatory environment. Organizations that fail to embed compliance into every step of their processes risk potentially heavy fines and sanctions. 

4. Keeping fraud risk at bay

According to the Federal Trade Commission, U.S. consumers lost over $12.5 billion to fraud schemes in 2024, representing a 25% increase over the prior year. Fraud prevention is an increasing focus of financial services organizations, with 41% of executives planning to prioritize digital onboarding and application processes, and two-thirds of credit unions identifying fraud prevention and cybersecurity as the top technology priority.

Ready to transform the financial services experience for your customers?Read our new guide

Digitizing account opening levels up the customer experience

In banking, opening a new account represents a high-touch moment of truth. For many customers, this process often involves disjointed paperwork, high abandonment rates, and manual data entry. 

To achieve growth in a challenging financial services environment, banks should streamline processes to provide an outstanding, frictionless customer experience. Docusign replaces high-friction account opening journeys with a secure, automated digital experience. 

Take these steps to achieve a streamlined customer experience:

Step 1: Application and data intake

To compete for new customers, banks need to create a frictionless, intuitive experience that fits modern digital preferences. For an increasing number of consumers, the application process begins on a mobile device. If lenders don’t offer mobile account-opening and loan-application processes, they may be missing out on important opportunities for new business. 

To address these issues, Docusign Web Forms converts complex forms into guided, mobile-responsive digital applications, allowing customers to start applications virtually anytime, anywhere. Web Forms uses conditional logic to dynamically adapt application questions based on the information provided. Applicants won’t need to re-enter information or provide irrelevant, redundant data. This simplicity directly translates to a higher completion rate and improved customer satisfaction. 

Step 2: Identity verification and prefill

During account opening, manual know-your-customer (KYC) verification can be slow, intrusive, and error-prone. In the traditional verification process, applicants often must re-enter personal information already held by the institution. 

Now, institutions can streamline information collection by allowing new applicants to digitally verify their identities during account opening. Docusign Identify allows applicants to upload images of common government-issued IDs or answer a series of personal questions to confirm their identity from virtually anywhere. This provides instant, secure KYC compliance and pre-fills application fields with verified data, supporting a “know-me” customer experience. 

Through Risk-Based Verification and partnerships with CLEAR and ID.me, banks can seamlessly balance a positive customer experience with robust regulatory compliance.  

Step 3: Upload supporting documents, review, and sign

During the onboarding process, new customers and loan applicants may receive multiple notifications to upload documents or manually enter and re-enter personal information. Banks face a high risk of data entry errors due to manual processes, lack of data persistence, and multiple entry requirements, with limited opportunities to correct errors if not flagged immediately. Missing documents can delay the closing process, and customers can get frustrated with requests for multiple signatures and consent requirements.

Docusign Workspaces serves as a central hub, enabling customers to seamlessly review all forms, upload requested documents, and digitally sign through Docusign eSignature. Leveraging integrations from the Docusign App Center, institutions can ensure information is pre-filled directly from the core system, eliminating the need for repetitive data entry and reducing manual errors. 

Step 4: Complete forms and consent to a credit check 

In the traditional process, staff manually check supporting documents and enter information into a Loan Origination System (LOS) or account-opening tool to conduct a credit check on the applicant. Duplicate data entry wastes time for both staff and customers and can lead to more errors. Delays and mistakes can erode the customer experience, impacting trust and confidence. 

Data Verification helps minimize typos and inaccurate information entered into both internal and external databases, ensuring data accuracy in real time and minimizing “not-in-good-order” (NIGO) issues. 

Step 5: Secure approval and prepare documents

Disconnected LOS platforms require staff to re-enter data manually, which can lead to errors. Slow, manual underwriting reviews can delay time to revenue. 

Docusign Maestro leverages LOS extension apps to support the flow of data and documents, helping to enable straight-through processing, reduce manual steps, and accelerate transactions. 

Step 6: Sign and open the account

Delays between final signature collection and writing to the core banking system increase the time to funding and account creation. Meanwhile, fragmented and unreliable audit trails heighten compliance risk.

But when the transaction is finalized with eSignature, followed by App Center integrations, the core system is automatically updated, and customers gain access to their account or loan without delay. Maestro routes the artifacts into the system of record or core repositories. Lastly, a unified audit trail and ID evidence provide unprecedented visibility into the end-to-end process, demonstrating effective controls, transparency, and compliance.

Deepening customer relationships with Docusign

All the Docusign tools used to streamline and automate the account-opening experience are part of the Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform. By leveraging a single, unified platform that streamlines account opening and maintenance workflows, institutions can create trusted financial journeys for every customer. 

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