Corporate onboarding is one of the most complex and time-consuming processes for Financial Crime Teams. From manual document handling to navigating back-and-forth interactions with clients, the process is often slow, inconsistent, and frustrating for both teams and customers. Add in the complexities of onboarding different types of corporates across varying risk profiles — while juggling fragmented systems for KYC checks, ID verification, screening, and adverse media monitoring — and it’s easy to see why improving corporate onboarding journeys is a priority for financial institutions in 2025.
In a recent webinar, we discussed solving corporate onboarding challenges - should you build, buy, or partner? Here are the key takeaways.
Watch the recording from our webinar here.
Before diving into the pros and cons of each approach, our panelists discussed the steps firms should take to assess their internal landscape. Key questions to consider:
Building an in-house solution to orchestrate your corporate onboarding journey provides full control and flexibility, but does have hidden costs and considerations. In-house solutions allow firms to manage their data, workflows, and risk methodologies. It may also integrate better with existing internal systems. However, the biggest hidden costs come from the need to constantly update the system to keep pace with regulatory changes. Building in-house also requires significant cross-functional collaboration with stakeholders between IT, compliance, and operations teams — something many firms underestimate.
Key takeaway: building an in-house tool to support corporate onboarding is a good option if you have highly specialised needs and a strong internal engineering team, but be prepared for ongoing investment and governance challenges.
There are different types of platforms that support corporate onboarding, from identity verification to document checks and to full end-to-end orchestration of the corporate onboarding journey. Depending on your requirements, vendor solutions can offer speed of set-up as well as the benefit of tried-and-tested functionality, which can speed up the onboarding journey. Vendors can provide capabilities such as automated screening and corporate registry checks, removing much of the manual burden from onboarding teams. Yet, over-reliance on third-party systems can create blind spots, especially if firms do not have clear visibility into vendor data sets or lists, or the risk methodologies used. Integration into existing workflows can also be challenging, particularly if the solution does not align with internal processes or if a firm has applied a vendor solution without full testing or thinking about the process holistically.
Key takeaway: Buying corporate onboarding solutions can offer functionality that is difficult to build and access to datasets directly and quickly — but you must have strong oversight into vendor processes and methodologies, and conduct sufficient testing to ensure the vendor actually solves your specific problem.
Outsourcing parts — or even all — of the corporate onboarding process can utilise specialist expertise and allow firms to scale more efficiently. Hybrid approaches are increasingly common, such as outsourcing high-risk or complex cases while retaining lower-risk onboarding in-house. However, partnership models require robust governance and oversight frameworks to ensure ongoing compliance and performance. Without clear oversight mechanisms, firms risk losing control over customer experience, risk management and regulatory outcomes.
Key takeaway: Hybrid models or partnering may be a good option for firms, depending on their size and maturity, to leverage external expertise while retaining flexibility – as long as governance, risk oversight, and clear SLAs are in place.
Overall, most firms will land somewhere between the three options — building certain capabilities in-house, buying specialist tools or datasets, and partnering for specific use cases. The key is to understand your internal capabilities, map out your end-to-end customer journey, and choose the approach (or combination) that best supports both regulatory compliance and a seamless customer experience.
Watch the recording from our webinar here.