Straight-through onboarding for a top-10 UK wealth platform

The client is a top-10 UK wealth platform whose onboarding is the first thing a prospective client experiences and a gateway governed by suitability and MiFID II obligations. The flow has to be rigorous enough to satisfy the regulator and smooth enough not to lose the client before they fund an account.

They had strong products and a strong brand, but were quietly losing prospects inside a long, branching onboarding journey, an expensive leak at the very top of the funnel.

The suitability and MiFID II flow was long and branching, and clients were dropping out midway, often before they ever funded an account. Every abandoned journey was an acquired prospect lost at the most expensive possible point.

The controls themselves were non-negotiable: this is regulated advice, so the suitability assessment and MiFID II checks could not be trimmed to shorten the flow. The challenge was to keep every control while removing the friction around them.

Earlier attempts to smooth the journey had stalled on exactly that tension, treating compliance and conversion as opposites. The platform needed both improved at once, not one traded for the other.

We rebuilt onboarding into a straight-through flow, re-sequencing the suitability engine and MiFID II checks so information is gathered once, in a logical order, and clients are not bounced back and forth or dropped mid-journey.

Not a single control was loosened. Every regulated check stayed intact; what changed was the journey around them, so the same rigorous assessment felt like a coherent path rather than an obstacle course.

We instrumented the funnel end to end and validated the rebuilt flow against real drop-off points before rolling it out, so the completion uplift was proven on live behaviour rather than assumed from a redesign.