How strategic banking leaders connect onboarding, risk, and growth with data

Banks want durable relationships with trusted business customers. But too often, they’re held back by siloed tools and disconnected teams. The results are less than ideal: long onboarding timelines, inconsistent risk decisions, and missed opportunities to grow share of wallet.

Strategic banking leaders are fixing this by putting business identity data at the center of their operations. With this approach, they create a shared foundation that connects the onboarding process, ongoing risk monitoring, and relationship growth so that every one of those teams can move faster, make better decisions, and earn more trust.

Which verification challenges are banks still facing today?

Two realities collide in most institutions:

• Onboarding takes too long. For commercial and corporate clients, the average onboarding timeline can stretch to weeks or even months. McKinsey reports it can take 30 to 100 days, with more than 40% of client time consumed by account opening and verification tasks. Every extra week means delayed revenue, a higher risk of customer drop-off, and a first impression that’s hard to recover from.
• Monitoring is not fully connected. Regulatory guidance is clear: customer due diligence isn’t a one-time task. The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) expects banks to update customer information, including beneficial ownership, on a risk basis. But for many banks, those updates happen in a different system from onboarding. That means risk insights don’t flow back to the teams responsible for relationship growth—or to those who could have used them to make better onboarding decisions in the first place.

When these challenges aren’t overcome, identity data ends up fragmented: product here, onboarding there, monitoring somewhere else. Without a single view of customer data, your bank usually ends up either moving slowly or taking on unnecessary risk.

The blueprint for strategic banking teams

High-performing banks aren’t just adding new tools; they’re rethinking how business identity data moves across their organizations. Here’s a practical, step-by-step approach to aligning your teams with data:

1. Inventory your identity workflows
   From application intake to ongoing monitoring, map every touchpoint where business identity data is collected, transformed, and used. Include who owns each step, what systems are involved, and where handoffs happen.

Why it matters: You can’t fix bottlenecks you haven’t identified. This map becomes your blueprint for eliminating duplicate work and closing gaps.

2. Define the business identity data model
   Decide on the canonical fields every team should capture: legal name, tax IDs, state registrations, UBOs, sanctions/PEP results, and web presence signals. Document the source of truth for each field, how confident you are in its accuracy, and how often it should be updated.

Why it matters: Standardizing definitions and sources means fewer mismatches between systems and fewer debates over which record is right.

3. Instrument and track cycle times
   Measure how long each stage takes (document collection, entity resolution, UBO confirmation) and set targets by customer type or risk tier.

Why it matters: These metrics will tell you whether changes are paying off, plus where to focus next. Many leaders discover that 80% of the delay happens in one or two steps that can be streamlined quickly.

4. Automate the repetitive work
   Start with high-volume, low-complexity tasks: document capture, entity resolution, and registry checks. Feed the same verified data into your monitoring process so that onboarding and ongoing oversight draw from one engine.

Why it matters: Automation helps speed up onboarding, and it also improves consistency and frees analysts to focus on higher-risk cases.

5. Close the loop to the front office
   Make sure risk insights reach the people managing the relationship. Pipe alerts and status updates into CRM and banker tools with clear next-best-action guidance—whether that’s refreshing KYC, requesting updated documents, or flagging a cross-sell opportunity.

Why it matters: Risk data in a silo is wasted potential. Front-line teams can turn it into value when they see it in context.

6. Align policy and model governance
   Treat policy changes like software updates: version them, test them, and deploy them across onboarding and monitoring at the same time. This matches the “reasonably designed” expectation in FinCEN’s proposed rule and keeps your risk posture consistent throughout the customer lifecycle.

Why it matters: Disconnected rules across workflows create gaps fraudsters can exploit—and headaches for auditors.

How to measure success when aligning teams across business identity data

When your business identity system is doing its job, you’ll see:

• Shorter time-to-revenue. Low-risk entities move from application to activation in days, not weeks.
• Lower rework. Data is consistent across teams, reducing back-and-forth requests.
• Fewer surprises. Ownership changes, adverse media, and sanctions updates surface quickly in dashboards and alerts.
• Better exam outcomes. Every decision is backed by a clear, auditable trail that ties onboarding actions to monitoring results.

Banks that get this right are able to control risk and grow faster. They also see measurable improvements in throughput and conversion. 

Consider Novo, a leading B2B fintech. Novo processes 10,000+ business applications each month and—after integrating Middesk’s Business Verification—now auto-approves over 50% of those applications, reducing manual reviews and lifting conversion while keeping strong risk controls in place.

Growth unlocked

Learn how Novo streamlined its onboarding process, auto-approved over half of its monthly business applications, and freed its team to focus on higher-value work. Read the Novo case study. if you want to control who visits your profile.