Compressing Weeks of Client Onboarding into Days

The Challenge

Advisors were pulling documents from 6 to 8 sources for every new client, spending about 9 hours assembling each portfolio profile before anyone could talk investment strategy. On the compliance side, 130 reviews were sitting in a backlog at any given time, each one taking 45 minutes of manual verification. The team had looked into AI tools but needed a consulting partner to identify what actually works inside a regulated wealth management workflow.

What We Built

We sat down with the advisory and compliance teams for a week and a half, going through their full intake process from first client call to portfolio activation. We set up an AI document extraction tool for record pulling, added an AI compliance screening engine, and spent four days training advisors and analysts across both offices. Eight days after training wrapped, advisors were finishing full onboardings in under 3 hours of active work.

Results

Onboarding dropped from 14 days to 2.7 days on average. Advisors went from 9 hours of intake paperwork per client to just over 2, freeing about 7 hours per client for actual advisory work. The compliance backlog, which had been sitting around 130 pending reviews, fell to under 15 within the first month. The consulting engagement paid for itself in 7 weeks through recovered advisor capacity, an estimated $280K in annual value.