Why Business Onboarding Is Banking’s Weakest Link

Long business onboarding isn’t just frustrating for customers - it’s expensive for banks. Industry research shows that corporate and SME onboarding commonly takes 90 to 120 days, driven largely by KYB and ownership verification requirements. McKinsey estimates average corporate onboarding timelines at around 100 days, while multiple industry studies show that a significant share of businesses abandon applications when onboarding stretches beyond a few weeks.

In practice, that means acquisition costs that never convert into deposits or lending relationships, and growth teams losing customers before a relationship has even begun.

When onboarding takes months, it’s no longer a compliance issue sitting quietly in the background. It becomes a commercial problem, showing up directly in pipeline leakage, delayed revenue, and lost lifetime value.

Most KYB cost sits in manual work, not controls

Regulation is often blamed for slow onboarding, but most of the time the real drag comes from how KYB is run day to day. Across the industry, the bulk of financial crime costs now sit in manual review, remediation, and rework. Business KYB cases routinely take much longer than individual KYC because ownership needs to be traced, documents interpreted, and the same information checked multiple times across different systems.

The controls are there. They’re just spread out, duplicated, and heavily dependent on people stitching everything together by hand.

Complex ownership isn’t an edge case anymore

Trusts, layered entities, and cross-border ownership used to be treated as exceptions. Today, they’re part of normal business onboarding, especially in markets like Australia. A significant portion of SMEs operate through structures that make beneficial ownership hard to establish quickly, particularly when data lives across registries or jurisdictions.

When teams have to manually trace ownership thresholds through multiple entities, outcomes start to vary. Two similar customers can end up with very different timelines or risk assessments, simply based on how complex their structure looks on paper.

Regulators expect KYB to keep working after onboarding

There’s also a clear shift in how regulators look at KYB. It’s no longer enough to run checks once and move on. Expectations are moving toward ongoing due diligence, where changes in ownership or control are picked up as they happen, not months later during a review cycle.

This is where static, document-heavy processes start to struggle. If KYB only works at onboarding, teams end up rebuilding the same picture of a business again and again, often under time pressure.

Some institutions are already feeling this pressure and adapting their approach. At one Tier-1 bank, ongoing due diligence now runs through a single orchestration layer, reducing manual intervention by around 25% and triggering follow-on KYC checks directly through its CRM. Instead of treating onboarding and monitoring as separate processes, the same framework supports both, reducing duplication, improving audit readiness, and keeping business risk data in one place over time.

Public ownership registers won’t fix broken workflows

Australia’s upcoming beneficial ownership register is an important step forward, but it won’t magically make KYB easier on its own. Other markets have already seen that while access to ownership data improves transparency, it also raises expectations around accuracy, reconciliation, and audit trails.

Without connected workflows, teams still have to interpret data, resolve discrepancies, and explain how ownership decisions were made. The data helps, but only if systems are built to use it properly.

Why orchestration makes a difference

This is where KYB orchestration changes the equation. Instead of passing a business through disconnected tools and teams, orchestration brings registry data, ownership logic, document handling, and monitoring into a single flow.

That removes the biggest sources of delay: repeated document requests, manual ownership analysis, and handoffs between systems that don’t talk to each other. Ownership structures are mapped automatically, documents are processed without manual parsing, and changes are picked up through ongoing monitoring rather than triggering a full re-review.

The result isn’t just faster onboarding. Decisions become more consistent, rework drops, and KYB continues to work after onboarding is complete. For compliance teams, that means fewer manual interventions and clearer risk signals. For the business, it means onboarding stops being the bottleneck that slows growth and starts working at the pace customers expect.

Ready to consolidate your KYB stack?

If your onboarding process still relies on manual document reviews, multiple KYC tools, and fragmented registry checks, consolidation is overdue.

FrankieOne orchestrates KYB end to end, helping institutions reduce onboarding time, lower operational overhead, and maintain regulatory confidence.