State Street to start electronic investor onboarding

State Street Corporation has appointed Australia's LAB Group to provide electronic investor onboarding for fund manager clients. Daniel Cheever, head of State Street Institutional Services, Australia, explains how the process will drastically reduce investor registration times and speed up identity verification.

How does electronic investor onboarding change your business process flow?

State Street Australia transfer agency (TA) team provides unit registry services to our fund manager clients. Part of the service provided by State Street's TA team includes investor identification verification (KYC) processing.

Investor onboarding has traditionally been a very manual and time consuming process; Investors complete paper application forms, provide a range of documents to confirm their identification, and send them to their transfer agent for manual processing and verification. By using LAB Group, we are able to digitise this process, remove manual intervention and provide investors with access to a portal where their identity can be verified against government approved databases and the onboarding process can be completed in less than 10 minutes.

What benefits are there to automating onboarding?

The speed at which an investor can be onboarded is dramatically increased and removes room for any manual error. The digitisation of investor onboarding process will significantly improve the experience for our fund manager clients and their investors. Implementing LAB online onboarding portal improves State Street's operating model through automation and reporting tools for oversight and workflow monitoring. Importantly, LAB's online KYC module captures and verifies investors' identity and conducts AML screening in real time to satisfy Australian AML/KYC requirements. Customer Identification is performed electronically and verified against reliable, trustworthy government and independent data.

What was the selection process like?

Given that our procurement process can be commercially sensitive, we do not ordinarily provide details on the selection process.

What requirements do you have to look out for? Are AML and KYC requirements an issue? What about data security?

Investors complete an online application consisting of three modules, Data Collection, KYC verification/AML Screening and secured document upload. From a regulatory perspective, the LAB platform also captures Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA)/ Common Reporting Standard (CRS) requirements as well as complies with AML legislation and AML/CTF/Financial Services Council ("FSC") guidelines.

What kind of time savings are we talking about?

The onboarding process has been reduced from several days down to less than 10 minutes.

Do you think you're the first in Australia to introduce this?

Regulators such as AUSTRAC have strongly encouraged financial services companies to support a seamless, secure and compliant customer journey.

LAB Group has been operating for more than 10 years, servicing more than 91 organisations including wealth managers, superannuation funds and banks, and this experience was an integral part of the value proposition.