Box for Banking: Modernizing investment banking workflows without the risk

Issues of compliance and best practice aside, managing onboarding and KYC remains a major administrative burden. In an age of banking automation and modernization, this manual, time intensive, and often frustrating experience is something of an anachronism. And has been for some time.

The lack of standard KYC procedures for onboarding doesn’t help. Clients partnering with different institutions don’t always get the same experience – which can sour relationships right out of the blocks. The lack of sufficiently detailed data at the beginning can also impact operational efficiencies down the line. There is a raft of other issues, too – but you know these only too well.

Ultimately, what should be a fairly straightforward process of receiving, checking, storing and then sharing relevant documentation with multiple stakeholders, most certainly isn’t. But it could be.

Let’s assume, for example, that you have a single, cloud-based repository for all the documents you need. You give clients access and they simply upload their files. There’s no back and forth on email, no lost attachments or ‘email returned’ issues due to large file sizes. Because of this central and secure store, everyone who needs access has it – from the onboarding and GRC teams, right through to the trader wanting to check a governance detail before completing a transaction.

Then let’s assume that each file can be tagged to make them searchable, and your file space can be integrated with the existing apps currently being used across the organization – so anyone with permissions can access the files without leaving the apps they’re in. How much easier would that be?

From a compliance and security perspective, you’ll also want to be able to add your own custom security policies and ensure access is permission-based. An audit trail is vital – to see who has uploaded, looked at and shared every single document. Not just so you can boost your own internal data management practices, but to ensure compliance with the host of national and international data protection regulations, including, of course, GDPR.

By now, you’ll not be too surprised to learn that Box has a solution. Cognizant of all the issues you face when onboarding clients, we’ve developed an onboarding-specific service that dramatically simplifies the process and is remarkably easy to use. Crucially, it has been independently reviewed for privacy and cloud data protection practices, so we help you tick all the compliance boxes.

Of course, for complex banking organizations tackling tough questions, solutions need to be quick to deploy, can’t swallow a lot of IT resources or cause disruption, and can’t require major cultural change. This latter deployment issue is really important. There are lots of discussions within the banking community about the potential of automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Rightly so, there is a huge potential in using machines and algorithms to automate a vast number of manual banking processes. Indeed, many banks are already heading in this direction. But there’s no getting away from the fact that these are longer-term goals, which generally require considerable investment and cultural change, and can’t be deployed in days.

In contrast, Box is KYC-ready right now.

You can learn more about Box for Banking here.