Why onboarding belongs on the COO agenda
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Compliance has become a tax on growth for banks and fintechs. Approximately $304 billion is spent globally each year on anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) compliance (Ronald F. Pol, Policy Design and Practice, ResearchGate). Still, about 30% of businesses drop out during onboarding (Duna, 2026).
Business customers have high lifetime value (LTV), making onboarding a revenue function (Duna, 2026). But onboarding is also a cost and efficiency issue.
Compliance teams are under constant pressure in regulated industries, serving as the first line of defense against fraud and regulatory fines. Manual processes slow analysts down and don’t leave much room for high-risk investigation.. Every missing document, back-and-forth email, and routine case review adds to the workload and cost of onboarding.
Compliance is a hygiene factor. Once the required checks are complete, the rest of the onboarding journey should help legitimate businesses become customers, without creating unnecessary work for either side.
Why customers drop out of your business onboarding process
Business customers expect onboarding to be quick and easy. Instead, they’re asked to email just one more PDF, answer one more question, and wait through another manual review. With each follow-up, financial institutions lose 15% of onboarding customers (Duna, 2026). This compounds with every additional request.
Each minute that passes also makes it less likely that a customer will complete the process. Duna’s data shows that if a business isn’t onboarded within 24 hours, conversion drops by about 55%. Some don’t even wait that long. More than half of applicants fail to complete onboarding if an application takes longer than 10 minutes (Ribbit Capital, Identity Newsletter).
Much of the problem comes from the way businesses manage compliance work. Documents live in inboxes, spreadsheets, and shared drives. Requests are handled over email, and reviews are handed off from one person to the next. This slows down the process and adds friction for everyone involved.
The true cost of compliance operations
Software makes up only one part of the compliance bill. What’s usually hidden are the operating costs underneath. These include the internal work required to review and approve customers, along with business process outsourcing (BPO).
Compliance teams also spend much of their time manually reviewing cases that ultimately require no action. False-positive rates in know-your-business (KYB) screening can exceed 90%, a figure confirmed by BCG, McKinsey, PwC, and ACAMS. Duna’s calculations put them closer to 99%.
Until now, companies have dealt with growing onboarding volume by hiring more analysts and outsourcing compliance operations. But this simply adds cost to an already inefficient process.
AI changes the onboarding operating model
AI moves compliance work out of email and spreadsheets, and into a system that can collect evidence, apply policy, and route cases automatically. In a policy-driven onboarding model, policies are no longer documented in a handbook and interpreted manually. They’re turned into code and applied as evidence is collected.
Each case is evaluated against policy requirements, and the system only flags cases that require human judgment. This helps analysts spend less time on routine checks and more time investigating risk. Duna reports that 90% of onboarding cases can now be reviewed in 41 seconds.
In one case, a leading European e-commerce platform needed to onboard a large number of sellers without increasing headcount. Using Duna's AI-native onboarding, the company reduced small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) onboarding time from eight days to less than one minute. They also cut follow-up cases by 53% and reduced onboarding drop-off rates by 37%.
“Duna removes friction. Fewer manual checks, fewer back-and-forths – a more efficient way to work for our compliance teams.”
Araba Eshun, MLRO, Plaid
In another, a European fintech cut median onboarding time by 4x, and reduced follow-up cases from 24% to 10%. Onboarding conversion increased by 27%.
"Our payment solution powers over 2 million customers. With Duna, new merchants get started in minutes – instead of days."
David Backstrom, Founder and CEO, SeQura
Duna estimates that only 10% of firms have made meaningful progress with AI in compliance.
The bar is higher because compliance decisions need to be explainable, auditable, and consistent enough to stand up to internal risk teams and external regulators.
The first approval is only the start
In regulated industries, onboarding is a continuous process that runs throughout the customer lifecycle. A business could change ownership, appear in a negative media report, fall under a revised policy, or come back to apply for another product.
When any of these happen, the business has to be reboarded, repeating the same manual work, follow-up requests, and operational cost all over again.
Most leaders we’ve talked with know how their initial onboarding performs. Fewer understand their reboarding completion rate or the cost of getting an existing customer through another review.
3 onboarding questions every COO should answer
If onboarding is going to be managed as an operating metric, the chief operating officer (COO) should be able to answer three questions.
1. What percentage of onboarding volume can we process without manual intervention?
Straight-through processing (STP) measures the percentage of onboarding volume that can be completed without human intervention. It speaks directly to the return on investment (ROI) of AI agents and automation.
The executives we’ve spoken to say their companies are at 50% STP or less, even though automated workflows can push STP rates above 80%. Higher STP rates reduce onboarding costs and repetitive work, improving analyst productivity without adding headcount.
2. What is our cost per completed business customer?
Companies that stop at software spend miss a major contributor to onboarding cost: the operating work needed to get businesses approved. The more manual work a case requires, the more expensive each approved customer becomes.
3. What is our business onboarding conversion rate?
Onboarding completion rate is the clearest measure of how many businesses are approved or lost during the process. Duna’s enterprise customers have seen onboarding conversion increase by 35-38% within the first six months of implementation.
“Duna’s AI agents reduce manual reviews, lower false positives, and increase straight-through processing,” said Matthijs Welle, CEO at Mews. “Exactly what our compliance team needs.”
Onboarding needs executive ownership
Business onboarding is still managed as a compliance workflow, even though it has a direct impact on conversion, cost, and productivity.
A policy-driven operating model removes repetitive work from the onboarding process. This speeds up approvals, giving teams more time to focus on high-risk areas, fraud patterns, and true policy violations.
See how Duna helps banks and fintechs reduce the cost of business onboarding while increasing productivity. Read our AI Memo or get in touch.
Compliance has become a tax on growth for banks and fintechs. Approximately $304 billion is spent globally each year on anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) compliance (Ronald F. Pol, Policy Design and Practice, ResearchGate). Still, about 30% of businesses drop out during onboarding (Duna, 2026).
Business customers have high lifetime value (LTV), making onboarding a revenue function (Duna, 2026). But onboarding is also a cost and efficiency issue.
Compliance teams are under constant pressure in regulated industries, serving as the first line of defense against fraud and regulatory fines. Manual processes slow analysts down and don’t leave much room for high-risk investigation.. Every missing document, back-and-forth email, and routine case review adds to the workload and cost of onboarding.
Compliance is a hygiene factor. Once the required checks are complete, the rest of the onboarding journey should help legitimate businesses become customers, without creating unnecessary work for either side.
Why customers drop out of your business onboarding process
Business customers expect onboarding to be quick and easy. Instead, they’re asked to email just one more PDF, answer one more question, and wait through another manual review. With each follow-up, financial institutions lose 15% of onboarding customers (Duna, 2026). This compounds with every additional request.
Each minute that passes also makes it less likely that a customer will complete the process. Duna’s data shows that if a business isn’t onboarded within 24 hours, conversion drops by about 55%. Some don’t even wait that long. More than half of applicants fail to complete onboarding if an application takes longer than 10 minutes (Ribbit Capital, Identity Newsletter).
Much of the problem comes from the way businesses manage compliance work. Documents live in inboxes, spreadsheets, and shared drives. Requests are handled over email, and reviews are handed off from one person to the next. This slows down the process and adds friction for everyone involved.
The true cost of compliance operations
Software makes up only one part of the compliance bill. What’s usually hidden are the operating costs underneath. These include the internal work required to review and approve customers, along with business process outsourcing (BPO).
Compliance teams also spend much of their time manually reviewing cases that ultimately require no action. False-positive rates in know-your-business (KYB) screening can exceed 90%, a figure confirmed by BCG, McKinsey, PwC, and ACAMS. Duna’s calculations put them closer to 99%.
Until now, companies have dealt with growing onboarding volume by hiring more analysts and outsourcing compliance operations. But this simply adds cost to an already inefficient process.
AI changes the onboarding operating model
AI moves compliance work out of email and spreadsheets, and into a system that can collect evidence, apply policy, and route cases automatically. In a policy-driven onboarding model, policies are no longer documented in a handbook and interpreted manually. They’re turned into code and applied as evidence is collected.
Each case is evaluated against policy requirements, and the system only flags cases that require human judgment. This helps analysts spend less time on routine checks and more time investigating risk. Duna reports that 90% of onboarding cases can now be reviewed in 41 seconds.
In one case, a leading European e-commerce platform needed to onboard a large number of sellers without increasing headcount. Using Duna's AI-native onboarding, the company reduced small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) onboarding time from eight days to less than one minute. They also cut follow-up cases by 53% and reduced onboarding drop-off rates by 37%.
“Duna removes friction. Fewer manual checks, fewer back-and-forths – a more efficient way to work for our compliance teams.”
Araba Eshun, MLRO, Plaid
In another, a European fintech cut median onboarding time by 4x, and reduced follow-up cases from 24% to 10%. Onboarding conversion increased by 27%.
"Our payment solution powers over 2 million customers. With Duna, new merchants get started in minutes – instead of days."
David Backstrom, Founder and CEO, SeQura
Duna estimates that only 10% of firms have made meaningful progress with AI in compliance.
The bar is higher because compliance decisions need to be explainable, auditable, and consistent enough to stand up to internal risk teams and external regulators.
The first approval is only the start
In regulated industries, onboarding is a continuous process that runs throughout the customer lifecycle. A business could change ownership, appear in a negative media report, fall under a revised policy, or come back to apply for another product.
When any of these happen, the business has to be reboarded, repeating the same manual work, follow-up requests, and operational cost all over again.
Most leaders we’ve talked with know how their initial onboarding performs. Fewer understand their reboarding completion rate or the cost of getting an existing customer through another review.
3 onboarding questions every COO should answer
If onboarding is going to be managed as an operating metric, the chief operating officer (COO) should be able to answer three questions.
1. What percentage of onboarding volume can we process without manual intervention?
Straight-through processing (STP) measures the percentage of onboarding volume that can be completed without human intervention. It speaks directly to the return on investment (ROI) of AI agents and automation.
The executives we’ve spoken to say their companies are at 50% STP or less, even though automated workflows can push STP rates above 80%. Higher STP rates reduce onboarding costs and repetitive work, improving analyst productivity without adding headcount.
2. What is our cost per completed business customer?
Companies that stop at software spend miss a major contributor to onboarding cost: the operating work needed to get businesses approved. The more manual work a case requires, the more expensive each approved customer becomes.
3. What is our business onboarding conversion rate?
Onboarding completion rate is the clearest measure of how many businesses are approved or lost during the process. Duna’s enterprise customers have seen onboarding conversion increase by 35-38% within the first six months of implementation.
“Duna’s AI agents reduce manual reviews, lower false positives, and increase straight-through processing,” said Matthijs Welle, CEO at Mews. “Exactly what our compliance team needs.”
Onboarding needs executive ownership
Business onboarding is still managed as a compliance workflow, even though it has a direct impact on conversion, cost, and productivity.
A policy-driven operating model removes repetitive work from the onboarding process. This speeds up approvals, giving teams more time to focus on high-risk areas, fraud patterns, and true policy violations.
See how Duna helps banks and fintechs reduce the cost of business onboarding while increasing productivity. Read our AI Memo or get in touch.
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