From complexity to confidence: Transforming client onboarding with Pega CLM/KYC

Client onboarding should be fast, compliant, and confidence-building. Instead, most banks face fragmented processes, long onboarding cycles, and dissatisfied clients. The stakes are high: rising regulations, mounting compliance costs, and lost revenue from frustrated customers.

This blog explores how Nagarro, with its deep domain expertise and partnership with Pega CLM/KYC, transforms client onboarding from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage. 

What’s in store?

• Why traditional approaches fail in today’s regulatory and customer landscape.
• How Pega’s CLM/KYC platform streamlines onboarding, compliance, and risk management.
• Real, measurable outcomes—from reduced onboarding times to improved client satisfaction.

With the right strategy and technology, onboarding shifts from being a compliance headache to becoming a catalyst for trust, speed, and growth.

The challenge for the BFSI industry: Compliance, cost and customer frustration

A 2023 McKinsey report estimates that  financial institutions globally spend over $50 billion each year on compliance.

Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters estimated that 89% of corporate clients rated their KYC experience as poor, marred with delays, redundant documentation requests and inconsistent communication. These inefficiencies impact not just compliance, but also customer trust, operational cost, and time-to-revenue.

Imagine a global bank trying to onboard a corporate client across multiple jurisdictions, each with its own regulatory requirements.  They don’t just have to ensure different regulations in different regions but also tackle internal silos. Add to that mail chains chasing documents and Excel trackers to capture checklists at every stage.  

The result?

• Manual handoffs between departments (legal, compliance, operations, front-office)
• Repeated data entry across systems
• Delays in collecting required documents and approvals
• Difficulty adapting to evolving regulations like AML, FATCA, CRS, and local compliance requirements

Consequently the onboarding times stretch to 30-90 days, with KYC remediation cycles lagging. Meanwhile, the compliance pressure from regulations like FATCA, CRS, and AML only worsen the chaos.

The lack of visibility, control, and standardization makes it almost impossible to scale confidently or improve customer experience.

Solving the onboarding challenge: A tech-driven transformation approach

Client onboarding and KYC aren’t just compliance tasks—they’re complex, multi-team journeys that demand precision, speed, and adaptability. To transform them, financial institutions need intelligent, scalable systems that evolve with both regulatory landscapes and customer expectations.

At Nagarro, we enable this transformation through four key pillars:

• Intelligent Process Automation (IPA): Uses AI and ML to automate compliance checks, route tasks intelligently, and reduce manual overhead.
• Rules-driven platforms: Dynamically adapt to regulations like FATCA, AML, and CRS, embedding compliance directly into workflows.
• Unified data models: Deliver a single customer view across products, jurisdictions, and systems—reducing duplication and improving risk profiling.
• Conversational analytics & AI: Provide real-time insights and guided interactions to improve efficiency and client experience.

Together with Pega, we bring these capabilities to life: designing intelligent workflows, embedding dynamic compliance rules, integrating siloed systems into unified client views, and enabling real-time decisioning. The result is seamless, compliant, and client-friendly onboarding at scale.

Why Pega?

Pega offers an end-to-end CLM/KYC platform that unifies onboarding, due diligence, risk assessments, document collection, and regulatory compliance into a single, intelligent backbone. Its modular, scalable design enables institutions to adapt quickly, standardize globally, and deliver seamless client journeys.

Key capabilities include:

• Dynamic case management: Orchestrates tasks across teams and systems based on client type, jurisdiction, and risk profile.
• No-code KYC rule engine: Instantly adapts to evolving regulatory requirements without coding delays.
• Smart questionnaires: Tailor data collection to jurisdiction, product, or segment, reducing friction for clients.
• Full audit trails & SLA tracking: Ensure transparency and regulatory confidence with end-to-end visibility.
• Seamless integrations: Connect easily with screening tools, CRMs, core banking, and document repositories, without disruption.

What sets Pega apart is its policy-driven automation, which replaces rigid workflows with adaptable, intelligent processes that empower both relationship managers and compliance teams.

Unified CLM/KYC backbone: Powering every client journey 

The diagram illustrates how CLM case orchestration is structured into three layers. At its core lies an orchestration spine, the common CLM backbone that anchors common stages and controls. Building on this, there are distinct journey types such as onboarding, maintenance, reviews, offboarding and due diligence, each layered to address major client interactions.

Within each journey, there are tailored sub-journeys that align with the specific business needs of clients based on their type, product, region, or risk profile. Each case type follows four core stages: Capture, Enrich, Due Diligence, and Fulfilment. The specific steps within these stages adapt to the journey type and its sub-journeys, together orchestrating the complete CLM process.

Pega’s framework doesn’t just digitize onboarding—it streamlines the entire client lifecycle from initial capture to offboarding, ensuring consistency, control, and scalability across jurisdictions. By eliminating silos and enabling a single source of truth, institutions gain:

Faster onboarding with fewer manual handoffs
Consistent compliance across global operations
A client experience that’s transparent, efficient, and builds trust

This unified backbone ensures banks can scale confidently, balancing compliance demands with the speed and personalization.

All legends shown in green are different stages present in CLM journey

Implementing this approach yields faster onboarding, stronger compliance, and an enhanced customer experience.

• 50%+ reduction in onboarding time: Workflows that once took 60+ days can now be reduced to weeks, enabling faster account activation and quicker revenue recognition.

• Compliance without compromise: Automated checks, version-controlled rule updates, and full audit logs reduce compliance gaps.
• Smarter, simpler client interactions: There is no need for repeated document asks or inconsistent communication. Faster onboarding and fewer document requests translate to higher client satisfaction.
• Workforce efficiency unlocked: Operations teams can handle more volume, with less burnout and compliance teams have confidence that no jurisdiction, risk factor, or documentation step is missed.

How to get started with Pega?

If your organization is ready to move past duplicate data entry, manual handoffs, and compliance errors, the first step is to take a hard look at your onboarding process. How long does it take today across geographies and client types? How easily can it adapt to new regulations? And most importantly, are clients experiencing so much friction that they drop out mid-way?

The answers to these questions often reveal the same issues: inefficiency, complexity, and a lack of agility. This is where having a strategic Pega partner can make a difference. With Pega, you can automate policy-driven workflows, gain real-time visibility with SLAs and audit trails, and align compliance dynamically across jurisdictions—all while simplifying tools for relationship managers and reducing backend complexity.

At Nagarro, we treat CLM and KYC modernization not just as a platform upgrade but as a way to rebuild trust and efficiency into every client interaction. Our consultative, outcome-driven approach combines deep financial services expertise with agile delivery and technical excellence. By leveraging ready-to-use components, accelerators, and integration models, we help you accelerate implementation, reduce risk, and create experiences that work seamlessly for both clients and internal teams.

In a world of rising compliance demands and evolving client expectations, onboarding can’t remain a bottleneck. With the right strategy and technology, it can become an intelligent, future-ready process.