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Let’s put it out there right from the start – your Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) journey has become increasingly complex, expensive, and difficult to navigate.
You’re not alone. After all, we live and work in a time of never-ending change.
The challenges facing financial institutions (FIs) continue to multiply and evolve – shifting economic and geopolitical conditions, growing regulation and operational complexity, intense competition, fast-paced technological advancement, escalating financial crime and fraud risks, credit risks, a volatile talent market. And of course, a profound shift in customer expectations and a fundamental reshaping of how financial institutions must interact with their customers across every stage of the lifecycle.
In the face of all these challenges, FIs must be on the lookout for emerging opportunities to grow and retain a profitable customer base. Opportunities that go beyond traditional technology integrations and instead deliver a truly unified CLM approach that empowers them to be more adaptive, responsive, and agile to the pace of change.
The status quo is unsustainable. It's costing banks an average of $20,000-$30,000 to onboard new commercial customers, and a further $25,000 can be lost due to delays in acquiring new them. Meanwhile FI’s are shouldering a global financial crime compliance cost of $206.1bn, plus a staggering £38.4 billion regulatory compliance price tag.
It’s time to embed intelligence everywhere and usher in a new era of Client Lifecycle Management.
Is there a better way to serve clients throughout the lifecycle?
Before we get to that, let’s first understand what we mean by CLM and why it’s so important for financial institutions.
Client Lifecycle Management, or CLM, refers to how FIs manage the end-to-end client relationship, from acquisition and initial onboarding to ongoing interactions and due diligence monitoring. At each stage, ensuring clients receive a compliant, smooth and personalised experience. CLM is important because, when done well, it enables FIs to attract more of the right clients, improve retention, build trust and loyalty, mitigate risks and ultimately enhance both profitability and regulatory compliance.
So why is a new approach needed?
We’ve mentioned the diverse range of emerging challenges facing FIs. But then add to that the compounding impact of outdated technology, disparate processes, risks of human error, siloed data, lack of a single client view, and an inability to create more value and operationalise the huge amounts of data FIs have access to.
No wonder CLM journeys are increasingly complex, expensive and difficult to navigate.
What does the future of CLM look like?
The future is a recalibrated CLM strategy that moves financial institutions from manual and inefficient processes to a data-driven, AI-powered and automated approach. One that addresses all their key challenges, unlocks significant value, improves operational efficacy, and frees up human capital for strategic decision making.
Marc Benioff famously said, “data is the new gold”. For FIs, nowhere is that statement more relevant right now than in the transformation of their CLM strategy.
Think the leveraging of deep data resources and advanced AI for transformative insights that enable smarter, faster decision making, enhanced regulatory compliance, proactive continuous risk management, and the delivery of highly-personalised experiences. Whilst at the same time bringing down the cost to acquire and serve, eliminating duplication of effort and manual processes, and improving agility and competitiveness in an ever-changing regulatory landscape.
Navigate cost and complexity - the benefits of intelligence everywhere CLM at every stage of the customer journey
- Acquire: Identify, visualise, and target the entire customer universe through advanced market intelligence, automated customer insights, and the delivery of highly-relevant engagement signals. Augment CRM environments with real-time data orchestration to improve prospecting and enhance sales and marketing interactions.
- Onboard: Orchestrate workflows, automate customer validation activities, execute KYC, KYB, and AML screening, and verify client identity all in one place. Perfectly balance customer experience and regulatory compliance, to reduce attrition, bringing down cost and time to acquire, eliminate the risk of errors, and meet demanding expectations.
- Originate: A streamlined application process that improves both efficiency and customer experience. Automate product applications, credit decisioning and underwriting, structure deals and documentation, and manage approvals and closing – streamline processes and reduce time to service and funding.
- Monitor: Leverage automation, real-time insights, and rules-based decisioning to proactively monitor and manage risk, improve experiences, and achieve continuous compliance. Seamlessly maintain real time 360-degree record of every customer, track portfolio and UBO changes, monitor AML compliance, stay ahead of sanctions screening, assess credit continuously, and maintain a complete audit trail.
- Retain: Enhance personalised support, proactive communication, and understanding the evolving needs of customers. Pivot quickly, aligning service delivery and interactions to changing requirements and market dynamics. Move from reactive to proactive account management, unlocking new opportunities to add value while reducing risk.
- Grow: Track customer progress, deepen relationships, expand the product footprint via relevant upsell and cross-sell, predict future needs, and enable next-level personalised experiences that foster trust and lasting loyalty.
The critical importance of reinventing onboarding
Nowhere is an intelligence everywhere approach to CLM more impactful than at onboarding stage.
With traditional banks facing off against their digitally-enabled challengers, improving the customer onboarding experience is key to sustainable, profitable growth.
Recent research uncovered that 38% of all new banking customers abandon the onboarding process if it takes too long. This is backed by our own research.
In our 2025 State of IDV report, we revealed the rate of abandoned sign-ups is potentially 2.9x greater than FIs estimate. The most common reason for this appears to be a total focus on regulatory compliance at the expense of customer experience; an imbalance could that be costing them dearly.
An intelligence everywhere approach creates a “wow factor” first impression - setting the tone, building trust, and defining the experience customers can expect to receive throughout the life of their customer relationship.
Wave goodbye to manual and cumbersome onboarding by automating the entire corporate onboarding process. Intelligence everywhere means FIs can meet regulatory compliance obligations whilst maintaining complete oversight and control over the experience the customer receives.
Welcome to a unified, data and AI-powered CLM platform that significantly accelerates the customer screening and verification process. Advanced data orchestration incorporating KYC, KYB, PEPs, sanctions, adverse media, email risk checks and identity verification allows FIs to manage all onboarding checks in one place - seamlessly guiding customers through onboarding in the most frictionless way possible. This reduces manual efforts and allows FIs to onboard more customers in less time, without compromising on either compliance or customer experience.
Proof of concepts already exists
Santander has seen a 75% decrease in onboarding effort by moving to a fully-digital journey, with time to onboard reduced from 14 to 5 days thanks to pre-population of customer data.
Metro Bank have automated business account opening to achieve an average opening time of just 15 minutes. They now onboard 11,200 new customers per year with 80% of applications going straight-through. On top of this, they were able to identify 14% more critical risk issues than their previous manual process, and were able to reduce average case time from 200 minutes to 8 minutes – a 94% improvement.
After automating much of their onboarding processes, Tide achieved a 72% increase in the number of SME applications processed in a 12 month period. Powered by advanced data orchestration, Tide can easily qualify applications and assign the right products based on the specific needs of SME customers, whilst limiting lengthy applications processes and delivering a personalised experience. In fact, application forms are now populated in under 2 minutes. This has contributed to a 90% increase in revenue.
ThinCats likewise adopted an intelligence everywhere approach to transform traditionally lengthy access to funding processes. As a result, they have achieved a 60% reduction in data entry and manual input time, and 166 minutes of total time savings per lending journey.
Are you ready for a new era of intelligence everywhere CLM?
CLM is a battleground for financial institutions in 2025.
The ultimate winners will be those that grasp the opportunity to redefine the path, and in doing so create better customer experiences at scale without compromising on compliance.
As a recent McKinsey report highlighted. “You’ve got to really be thoughtful about how and where to spend to get the most bang for the buck, particularly as it relates to tech.”
FI’s are being buffeted by a broad range of challenges, many of which are moving at pace and forcing them to evolve quickly. Those that invest in intelligence everywhere will reduce the cost and complexity of customer lifecycle management, thereby simultaneously boosting profitability, customer experience, and compliance.
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