Goodbye paper, hello speed: Transforming onboarding for Cater Allen

Cater Allen replaced paper-driven customer onboarding with a streamlined digital solution to boost speed, capacity, and customer satisfaction

Customer experience

Who we worked with

Cater Allen, a bank providing services for personal, business, trust, and pension accounts.

What the company needed

Cater Allen wanted to modernize its legacy, paper-based onboarding process that took longer than needed for today's clients. By streamlining and digitalizing this process, it plans to enhance efficiency and customer experience, aligning with its growth strategy.

How we helped

We collaborated with Cater Allen to design and implement a modern onboarding solution, built on Salesforce Experience Cloud and Sales Cloud. The new, fully digital process features:

 

  • A secure digital application portal for intermediaries

  • A user-first design

  • Automated workflows that route applications to back-office and financial crime teams

  • Direct integration with the core banking system

  • A phased go-live rollout

What the company got

The new digital solution fundamentally changed the onboarding experience for Cater Allen, helping the bank:

 

  • Achieve straight-through applications for some customers in 24 hours, with average new customer onboarding now less than 5 days

  • Improve customer satisfaction with a faster, more intuitive process

  • Reduce the number of applications needing reworks and follow-ups

  • Achieve significant productivity gains for back-office teams

  • Reduce costs associated with paper, printing, and postage

Challenge

Overcoming the drag of a paper-based process

For Cater Allen, onboarding new customers was a manual, paper-intensive process. This created significant operational hurdles, impacting customer experience, delaying time to revenue, and limiting growth. To grow and improve its service, Cater Allen needed a complete, end-to-end digital process overhaul of its customer onboarding function.

Solution

Designing a seamless digital onboarding journey

Building on our existing relationship with the client and deep banking domain expertise, we collaborated with Cater Allen to reengineer its onboarding experience from the ground up. Together, we developed a comprehensive service that:

 

  1. Discovered the root causes of delays by analyzing the paper-based process for multiple account types, identifying key inefficiencies and pain points
  2. Designed an intuitive and secure digital interface with automated workflows, integrating with core banking systems to ensure regulatory compliance and a seamless experience
  3. Implemented the new Salesforce onboarding solution for customers and internal teams, using an automated DevOps continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to ensure quality and speed
  4. Gathered continuous feedback through regular show-and-tell sessions with the business, allowing for iterative refinement to meet strategic goals
  5. Established clear governance, including a responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed (RACI) matrix, to define roles and foster accountability, ensuring strategic alignment and effective change management
  6. Automated validations and risk controls within the platform to improve accuracy, reduce manual effort, and ensure applications meet the bank's risk appetite from the start

Impact

Delivering speed, efficiency, and superior experiences

Delivering speed, efficiency, and superior experiences

Our collaboration transformed Cater Allen's onboarding function, moving it from a manual operation to a fast, digital, and customer-centric process. The results highlight a fundamental shift in performance and customer satisfaction.

 

The impact of this transformation is clear:

 

  • An average 75% reduction in onboarding cycle time, with some straight through applications onboarded in 24 hours

  • An estimated 50% decrease in cases requiring additional information from the customer

  • Up to 90% reduction in manual intervention for back-office agents

  • An estimated 60% increase in capacity for the onboarding team

  • Cost reduction related to paper, printing, and postage

     

This initiative not only solved the immediate challenges but also created a scalable platform for future growth, allowing Cater Allen to serve its customers faster and more efficiently

 Genpact delivered a Salesforce-based onboarding solution through highly collaborative ways of working. The team brought deep platform expertise and a strong understanding of banking needs, delivering a scalable foundation that accelerates onboarding and elevates customer experience. This now enables future growth for Cater Allen, supporting the rollout of new customer journeys, enhanced personalization, and continued innovation across the lifecycle.

Nazia Hussain

Head of IT, Cater Allen

Our work continues by exploring how to build on this success. We plan to use advanced technologies like agentic AI and Salesforce Agentforce solutions to introduce smarter automation and more personalized interactions. We'll also focus on continuous monitoring and improvement, expanding integration with other systems, analyzing performance data to inform strategy, and scaling the solution to other areas of the business.

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