Alfred Kahn is the founder and CEO at OvationCXM, a customer experience management company.
One in 4 companies abandon bank onboarding before using the product they signed up for, according to our February 2025 research report titled “The Business Banking Customer Experience Report.” We asked 834 businesses about the most frustrating parts of onboarding, and 32% cited reasons related to confusing processes, unclear next steps and information gaps. To compare, only 12% cited unexpected changes to pricing.
This isn’t churn; these are clients who quit before they get started. This friction is more than a CX failure or a torpedoed NPS score. It’s an acquisition cost that never turns into revenue. It’s also avoidable.
The Onboarding Gap That Costs Financial Institutions
Onboarding is complex, depending on the product. It typically includes manual steps across different teams, separate legacy systems and external partners.
That may be why onboarding abandonment is highest in complicated banking products—treasury management and merchant services top the list. Inefficiencies, broken handoffs, communication gaps and uncoordinated processes stall activation and put undue burdens on businesses to figure out how to get a product up and running.
Our research also found that 76% of businesses would abandon onboarding if four or more representatives were involved, 41% said they would walk away if an onboarding issue wasn’t resolved within 24 hours, 93% of treasury management clients needed support during onboarding, and over 90% of businesses had to repeat the same information or documentation to different people when solving a single banking issue.
Many banking organizations are not aware of all interactions happening with their customers when they engage with different teams, channels or partners. However, this is not what business banking customers want; 97% said they expect seamless interactions wherever they happen.
You don’t lose customers only at the end of a journey. You can just as easily lose them at the beginning when the process doesn’t match the promise.
Why Orchestration—Not Just Automation—Is The Fix
It’s tempting to think service friction can be addressed by digitizing forms, deploying AI bots or automating follow-up. However, when solutions meant to remove friction are deployed in isolation (by product or department), the overall journey will continue to be fragmented, inconvenient and frustrating.
What’s missing isn’t more technology; it’s the right technology that can centralize customer data that’s scattered across systems and partner platforms. Unifying this data provides transparency but also fuels GenAI analytics and automations.
A Road Map For Banking Leaders
The research can be viewed as a summary of customer preferences, but it’s actually a compilation of gaps in business banking CX today. Onboarding doesn’t fall apart because of price or missing product features; it falls apart due to poorly orchestrated, high-effort journeys.
Leading banks and credit unions recognize the urgency to address onboarding. When we work with banking providers to evaluate their onboarding processes, we recommend three best practices to modernize the journey.
1. Reframe onboarding as a growth lever, not an operational workflow.
Global executives bemoan the negative impacts of poor customer onboarding and subsequent abandonment. According to a November 2022 Abbyy report, 37% of surveyed organizations said it led to lost business opportunities, and 33% believed it drove customers into the arms of competitors, confirming its importance to the bottom line.
Many organizations recognize the need for onboarding optimization but can’t rein in their fragmented processes. We recommend assigning an executive sponsor who brings visibility and accountability to onboarding, using enterprise-wide metrics that align with how customers define onboarding success, like time to first value (TTFV) or time to first transaction (TTFT).
2. Invest in technology to coordinate customer journeys across product lines, teams, platforms and partners.
Customer experience doesn’t break down just because of clunky technology. In reality, it fails when customers feel the organizational chart. Banking customers expect seamless experiences, but instead, they feel every bump in the back office.
The good news is that banks don’t have to overhaul processes or systems to provide streamlined CX. However, they do have to overhaul how customers experience those processes and systems.
An orchestration layer is an effective way to do that by bringing together onboarding data scattered throughout the banking ecosystem into one place, equipping every support agent to view and act on it. Teams gain real-time visibility and context into the entire customer relationship, eliminating swivel-seat servicing.
If the platform is purpose-built for financial services, it can bypass custom development work typically required and plug into preconfigured, banking-specific connectors. Real-time visibility enabled by legacy integrations can maximize agility.
3. Pair customer data with AI-powered journey tools for faster onboarding improvements.
Unlocking real-time onboarding data is only half of the story. Financial institutions also need tools to gather insights from that data and then take steps to enhance processes.
Banks benefit by pairing in-platform AI with a journey builder that makes it simple to adjust onboarding journeys on the fly. These no-code tools are especially important for business line leaders who sit closest to their customers because they give them the ability to adjust journeys based on data insights, customer expectations and competitive pressures at speed without waiting for dev cycles or IT resources. Business line leaders can innovate quickly, launching new offerings, personalizing experiences and providing proactive, data-driven recommendations and service.
The Cost Of Doing Nothing
Each time a customer abandons onboarding, an institution loses revenue, acquisition effort and dollars, and brand reputation. Financial institutions that grow in the next decade must take steps to elevate onboarding to the same importance as customer acquisition by prioritizing 360-degree visibility of customer data and deploying real-time agile CX orchestration to act on AI insights from that data.
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