Streamline Client Onboarding with DocuSign CLM and Quik!

It’s time for wealth management firms to modernize client onboarding. The process today is slow and painful, taking on average 32 days to onboard a new client and as long as 41 days for high net worth clients.

Onboarding is challenging because of the mountain of paperwork involved. The typical onboarding package contains many different types of documentation, including investor-advisor service agreements, compliance forms, custodian forms and other administrative documents. To execute these packages, advisors must collect complete client data, accurately pull this data into various documents, manage revisions to agreements, ensure the latest versions of forms are used and finally send these forms to investors in the right order. At every stage, there are compliance considerations that complicate actions even further.

This collation of agreements is cumbersome enough when it’s a single account, but advisors often onboard households with different combinations of document packages, which amplifies the burden on the organization and the peril of NIGO (not in good order) errors. Given the many steps in this process, it is no wonder that advisors rank account opening as the most cumbersome part of their client interactions.

Advisors have yet to find a way to onboard clients seamlessly, but the clock is ticking. There’s a new generation of investors and 57% of them state they would change their financial advisor if he/she did not use technology to enhance his/her services. This generation is breeding the next era of financial advisors, who expect their employers to leverage technology as much as possible and will evaluate their career moves in that respect. That’s where DocuSign CLM and Quik! can help—by providing a smarter and easier way to complete onboarding for advisors and investors.

Quik! automates custodian forms by making it easier to find and populate the forms with the latest information. It also eases the flow of data between systems. With DocuSign CLM, you can automate the generation of internal onboarding agreements, facilitate legal review/approval and combine all documents together for signing.

With this integration, advisors can prepare and manage both their internal agreements and third-party custodian forms without ever leaving their preferred CRM, such as Salesforce. Here’s how it works:

1. Start: In Salesforce, navigate to accounts and click “Generate onboarding package”
2. Select: Choose investor agreement (e.g. IAA, sub-advisory agreement), custodian (e.g. Charles Schwab) and account type (e.g. Traditional IRA, Roth IRA) 
3. Review: Add and edit additional information (like fee schedules) to auto-generated onboarding package 
4. Approve: Circulate to client or other internal parties for edits and approval
5. Sign: Send package to investor for signing and route and store data back in Salesforce

“Quik! and DocuSign are joining forces from different sides of the same problem,” said Richard Walker, CEO of Quik!. “Why should advisors have one process for preparing custodian forms and another for dynamic, investor agreements? From a big picture, a single account should have a single package of documents.”

Behind-the-scenes logic and APIs eliminate several manual steps from the preparation of onboarding packages. Advisors no longer need to manually retrieve the latest and relevant custodian forms. All documents are brought together in one place, no longer needing to be sequenced and sent in splintered packages. Agreements can be automatically routed to the right parties for review and approval with limited manual intervention. Finally, digital audit trails help firms easily meet compliance requirements.

To make this vision a reality, DocuSign and Quik! partner with systems integrators like Advanced Technology Group (ATG), a Cognizant company to help firms more efficiently navigate complex implementations that meet their custom requirements.

“ATG has developed field-tested integrations between all systems, and we help each client customize the solution to their own needs,” said Hanna St. Peter, Associate Director at ATG Cognizant. “The pre-built integrations provide a head start to the implementation, and our project teams work closely with clients to elicit the right build requirements early on in the project.”

The result is a seamless and more productive experience for both advisors and investors.

“We are excited to show customers just how much is possible with this solution,” said Patrick Meyer, director, wealth management strategy at DocuSign. “In a recent conversation, for example, we walked through how firms with multiple custodians can use flexible clauses to simplify and reduce the number of omnibus agreements they manage. Each firm is unique and we look forward to collaborating and building a better onboarding process that works for them.”