Fixing client onboarding at the point of selection
Cut onboarding rejections by 80% with eligibility rules that block invalid product combinations up front, and cut onboarding time by 65% by modernizing the APIs behind it.
Context
One in four client onboarding applications in the reviewed product subset was rejected. Each rejection meant wasted work for sales and operations, a delayed start for the client, and compliance exposure from applications that should never have been submitted.
Sales teams had no way to know up front whether a product combination was valid for a given client's jurisdiction and entity type. They submitted optimistically and found out weeks later.
Constraints
- Eligibility logic lived in compliance documents, tribal knowledge and individual reviewers' heads.
- Rules vary by jurisdiction and client conditions, and change with regulation.
- The onboarding flow ran on aging APIs that made every step slow.
Options on the table
Detective, not preventive. It would catch the same bad applications slightly faster and still waste the work that went into them.
Twelve months of rejection data showed most rejections were predictable, rule-based conflicts. Encoding those rules where products are chosen prevents the bad application from existing.
The decision
An eligibility rule framework evaluates product and client combinations in real time as products are selected, blocks invalid ones, and explains why with alternatives. It encodes jurisdictional regulations, entity restrictions and product dependencies.
In parallel, the API infrastructure behind onboarding was modernized, so the valid applications also moved faster.
My role
Analyzed the rejection data, made the case for prevention over detection, and led the work with compliance, legal and the product catalog team to codify rules that had been applied inconsistently.
Owned the onboarding API modernization roadmap.
Outcome
Rejections fell from 25% to under 5% within the reviewed product subset, avoiding 3,500+ rejected applications a year. Onboarding time fell 65%, from 20+ days to under 7, across 18,000+ requests a year, so front-office teams closed more volume without adding headcount.
The best compliance control here was one sales teams did not experience as a control. They experienced a tool that helped them build valid applications faster.
What I would change
Treat rule codification as its own workstream with its own owner. Getting compliance, legal and the business to agree on rules that had lived in people's heads was the long pole, not the engineering.