Risk-Based Onboarding: Balancing Seamless Customer Experience and Compliance

Navigating the Crossroads of Experience and Compliance

Onboarding customers in today's digital landscape is all about finding the right balance: make the process too complicated and you’ll see more customers drop off before they ever convert. Make it too simple, and you run the risk of missing compliance requirements or exposing your business to new threats. When processes aren’t well-designed, operations get bogged down with manual reviews.

On top of that, regulations are stricter, customers want seamless experiences, and identity threats like deepfakes are on the rise. As a result, many businesses are moving away from rigid, one-size-fits-all processes to smarter, risk-based strategies.

In this blog, we’ll show what risk-based onboarding looks like in practice, and how FrankieOne can help you deliver onboarding that’s effortless for customers, efficient for your team, and always compliant.

How to Set Up Risk-Based Onboarding?

Risk-based onboarding lets you deliver a smoother, more tailored experience for genuine customers while keeping your business protected and compliant. Here’s how to get started:

Step 1: Map Your Current Process

Start by reviewing your onboarding flow. Identify the different customer risk profiles you encounter (low, medium, high) and note how each profile impacts conversion, fraud rates, and operational workload.

Step 2: Align on Risk and Compliance

Work with your compliance team to define which customers can go straight through with minimal checks, and where you’ll need to add extra verification or even block onboarding altogether.

Step 3: Build Your Risk-Based Flow with FrankieOne

Here’s a concrete flow you can adopt:

• Low-risk customers: Use silent, pre-KYC fraud signals, like device fingerprinting, phone/email reputation, and behavioural analytics. If nothing is flagged, proceed with standard KYC and AML screening, no need for additional ID checks.

• Medium/high-risk customers: If risk signals appear (e.g. untrusted device, odd behaviour, prepaid phone number), trigger additional checks, such as asking for a photo ID and a liveness test.

• Obvious fraud or very high risk: Stop the process before costly or spoofable verification steps are triggered.

Step 4: Optimise and Adapt

Once live, use FrankieOne’s data and analytics to:

• Monitor performance and detect new risks
• Continuously improve conversion and user experience
• Adjust workflows to increase straight-through processing without compromising security
  

AML/CTF Tranche 2 - Stay Ahead of Regulatory Changes

As new obligations like Tranche 2 come into effect, industries such as accounting, real estate, and legal services are now required to meet stringent onboarding and compliance standards, often for the first time. 

FrankieOne is built for speed and simplicity. Our fully hosted onboarding solution comes ready with integrated fraud, KYC, and AML tools, so you can get started quickly with minimal integration. This means you can respond to evolving regulations without disrupting your business or building new processes from scratch. 

Our platform handles the compliance complexity behind the scenes, so your team can focus on growth and what matters most.

A Better Onboarding Experience for Your Team and Your Customers

With FrankieOne, product, operations, and compliance teams each get what matters most: higher conversion, greater efficiency, and flexible compliance - all in one streamlined onboarding flow.

   ✔  Fast and frictionless onboarding: Customers are verified quickly and seamlessly. This means more genuine customers complete sign-up, boosting conversion rates and helping you grow your user base.

   ✔  Fewer manual reviews: Automated, risk-based flows cut down on manual reviews, freeing up your team to focus on the cases that really need attention and making onboarding more efficient.

Ready to transform your onboarding journey?

Learn more about FrankieOne’s risk-based onboarding or explore the unified fraud detection blog.