Onboarding loses you clients before you start advising them.
Days of forms, follow-up calls, PDFs. First impressions matter, and 2005 isn't one.
First impressions are expensive to waste
A prospective client contacts your firm. They are interested, motivated, ready to engage. What happens next?
In most firms: a PDF fact-find arrives by email. The client prints it, fills it in by hand (or struggles with the fillable fields that never quite work), scans it and sends it back. A paraplanner rekeys the data. Half the fields need clarification. Someone calls the client. The client is in a meeting. Three days pass. A follow-up email. Another week.
By the time onboarding is complete, two to four weeks have elapsed. The client's enthusiasm has cooled. Some clients never complete the process at all — they simply disappear, taking their assets and their referral potential with them.
The industry calls this "drop-off." It is a polite word for "we lost the client because our process was too slow and too painful."
Meanwhile, your competitors — the ones with digital onboarding — captured the same data in a single session, on the client's phone, while the client was still motivated. The data arrived structured, validated and ready for the advice process. No rekeying. No follow-up calls. No drop-off.
Every week your onboarding process takes, you lose clients you already won.
Everything in one journey. On any device. In minutes.
Focus Digital Client Engagement transforms onboarding from a multi-week ordeal into a single, guided journey that clients complete on their phone, tablet or laptop.
Fact-finding, risk profiling, affordability assessment, anti-money-laundering checks, capacity for loss evaluation, all captured in one conversational flow that adapts to the client's answers. The journey branches intelligently: a client with a simple ISA transfer sees different questions than one with a complex pension consolidation.
Data is validated in real-time. If something does not make sense — income figures that do not add up, inconsistent risk responses — the journey flags it immediately, while the client is still engaged. No follow-up calls. No "sorry, could you clarify question 47?"
Everything arrives in your CRM and advice engine as structured, verified data. Your paraplanner starts work immediately instead of spending the first hour deciphering handwriting and chasing missing fields.
The client experience? Professional, modern, respectful of their time. The kind of first impression that generates referrals rather than apologies.
ONBOARDING BY THE NUMBERS
Digital onboarding by the numbers
60%
Less time from first contact to advice-ready data
9 hrs
Saved per case, no rekeying, no follow-ups
90%
Case automation, end-to-end
75%
Less spend on onboarding admin and validation
Onboarding tools from Focus
Digital onboarding is the front door of your advice process. Focus ensures that door opens smoothly and connects to everything behind it.
Digital Client Engagement — Configurable journeys for fact-finding, risk profiling, affordability assessment and more. Mobile-first, conversational and fully integrated with the Focus platform.
Advice Club — Free standalone tools built on the same DCE technology. Use them independently or as a gateway to your full advice proposition. Mortgage calculators, pension modellers and smart savers that clients can use before they even become clients.
The best onboarding experiences do not feel like onboarding. They feel like the start of a conversation. That is what DCE delivers.
How many clients did you lose to slow onboarding this quarter?
Talk to us about digital onboarding that converts prospects into clients in minutes, not weeks.