Celent’s 2025 Global Commercial Banking Onboarding Survey of 409 professionals across North America, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific highlights the scale of onboarding challenges for banks with $10bn–$500bn+ in assets. The study found 73% of banks lack a single source of data for onboarding, leading to inefficiencies and higher costs, with operations averaging $15.9m annually. To tackle this, many European banks are turning to nCino to unify data, streamline processes, and enhance client experience.
Celent’s research highlights three major hurdles undermining commercial banking onboarding. First, data fragmentation creates chaos.
Without a single source of truth, every department operates in isolation. Customer information is scattered across multiple systems, leaving relationship managers hunting for data that already exists somewhere else, wasting days of effort and slowing client engagement.
Second, duplicate work drives clients away. The report found that 66% of banks force customers to repeatedly enter the same information across systems.
For a busy CFO, having to provide the same company structure multiple times is frustrating, often resulting in lost clients who turn to competitors with smoother onboarding processes.
Finally, failed AI ROI exposes the real problem. Despite millions invested in AI, 71% of banks reported that their data architecture is not ready to support AI initiatives. Algorithms require clean, unified data to function effectively; without it, AI deployments sit idle, unable to deliver the promised efficiencies and insights.
Inefficient onboarding has tangible financial consequences. In EMEA, 7.7% of potential clients abandon the onboarding process, costing banks roughly $14,600 per lost customer. For banks onboarding 1,000 clients annually, this represents over $1m in wasted investment.
Coupled with an average 49-day onboarding timeline, revenue generation is delayed, and operational costs remain high.
How nCino solves the problem
nCino offers a unified platform built on Salesforce’s proven infrastructure, providing a single source of truth. Relationship managers can access comprehensive client data—including relationship history, document status, compliance checks, and product holdings—all in one view, eliminating the inefficiencies caused by fragmented systems.
The platform also provides end-to-end lifecycle management, integrating seamlessly with existing core banking systems.
Unlike competitors requiring multiple point solutions, nCino combines KYC and KYB capabilities with its loan origination system, enabling continuous monitoring and automated compliance alerts within a single platform.
To eliminate duplicate data entry, nCino leverages over 270m business records across the UK and Ireland, automatically pre-populating fields and flagging updates from uploaded documents. This reduces friction for clients and ensures teams spend less time on manual data management.
Preparing banks for AI and digital transformation
With a clean, unified data foundation, nCino enables AI deployment to automate routine tasks and support intelligent decision-making.
Relationship managers can focus on complex problem-solving and client engagement, while the platform handles repetitive processes, improving efficiency and creating a frictionless client experience.
Purpose-built for commercial banking
Designed by bankers for bankers, nCino comes with pre-built workflows tailored to commercial banking operations.
The platform handles complex entity structures, beneficial ownership, and jurisdiction-specific compliance requirements while remaining fully configurable to each bank’s needs.
The EMEA advantage
Local teams across the UK and Europe bring deep regulatory and market expertise, ensuring workflows reflect real operational realities.
Implementation is faster than custom-built projects, enabling banks to realise value from day one while positioning themselves for future digital transformation.
Implementation and success metrics
nCino deployments follow three phases: high-impact automation, building a unified data foundation, and intelligence deployment for AI initiatives. Banks can measure success by tracking relationship growth, revenue per relationship, onboarding speed, conversion rates, and compliance accuracy.
EMEA banks face a critical choice: continue struggling with fragmented systems and lost revenue, or embrace unified onboarding with nCino.
Banks acting now are not only solving today’s inefficiencies—they are preparing for a future where onboarding is seamless, intelligent, and revenue-generating.
Read the full blog from nCino here.
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