How Santander uses Docusign to provide 100% digital onboarding and loan fulfilment

How Santander uses Docusign to provide 100% digital onboarding and loan fulfilment

The digitisation of processes has become more important than ever, as entire departments and businesses are dependent on functioning remotely. In recent years, Santander UK’s SME, Commercial and Corporate Banking teams -  which offer financial services products to businesses with a turnover of between £500,000 and £500 million - have undergone a digital transformation taking on 10+ years of manual processes.

Santander UK’s determination to improve customer and employee experience has meant tackling two of the biggest frustrations for business customers in securing loans: the onboarding process, and time-to-cash. Partnering with Docusign and implementing the Docusign Agreement Cloud has successfully tackled these challenges while significantly reducing the admin burden so that employees can focus on customers instead of paperwork.

How Santander UK is using Docusign for customer onboarding

Onboarding a new customer in banking can involve days of information gathering, completing the application, verifying identity, printing or emailing, and waiting for the customer to sign and return the documents. Every passing day raises the risk of the customer becoming frustrated and finding a faster competitor. In addition, manual paperwork invites mistakes that incur further costs and delays. For larger banks, these opportunity and productivity costs can add up. 

Santander has drastically reduced the time it takes for new customers to open an account and access funds—allowing them to do so digitally, without the need to go to a branch or send paperwork. 

The manual onboarding process that Santander had in place involved a new customer filling out one of 39 editable PDF forms (depending on product) and then manually printing, signing and returning the form to a local branch. The Docusign Agreement Cloud enabled Santander to digitise these steps and transformed the 39 PDF forms into one dynamic, online form - that can be completed remotely.

The result? The onboarding process that previously took an average of 12 days to complete (and sometimes up to 25) now takes an average of just 2 days. 

How Santander UK is using Docusign for loan fulfilment 

Santander’s end-to-end digital loan application significantly reduces time to cash as well as improving user experience for current and future customers. Santander worked with technology firms including nCino, Salesforce and Docusign in order to deliver an exceptional, cloud-based customer experience.

Loan negotiation and contract completion between the bank and the applicant can now occur seamlessly in one system, thanks to  Docusign CLM and Docusign’s API (application programming interface) integration with nCino. Thanks to these projects, Santander customers can be onboarded and loans can be fulfilled 100% digitally, online, without the need to go to a branch or send off paperwork - making it even more useful today.

What’s next?

The pandemic has forced organisations to adapt and overcome many obstacles - to enable employees to work from home and customers to access services remotely. So, one thing is clear - digital transformation is more important than before. 

It is clear that digitising onboarding and loan fulfilment processes can help drive competitive advantage in banking. For Santander UK, regardless of whatever challenge the digital transformation team tackles next, the end goal will remain the same: using technology to improve the customer experience.

Read the full Santander case story.