Software Development

Business account onboarding, from nine days to under an hour

Digitising business account onboarding for Vero Bank, reducing median time to account opening from nine days to 47 minutes while keeping full audit compliance.

Client: Vero Bank
Industry: Financial services
Discipline: Software Development
Year: 2025
Duration: 6 months

The challenge

Opening a business account at Vero took a median of nine days. Applicants filled in a PDF, emailed it, and waited while a compliance officer requested the three documents that were always missing. About a third of applications were abandoned before completion.

The constraint was real: every step had to remain auditable, and the bank’s compliance function had been burned before by a vendor tool that lost its audit trail during an upgrade.

What we did

We mapped the process with compliance in the room, and separated the checks a machine can perform from those that require judgement. Registry lookups, document classification and sanctions screening are automated. Beneficial ownership above a threshold still goes to a human, as it must.

Every state transition writes an append-only event with the actor, the input and the rule version applied. Compliance can reconstruct any decision, which is what made the automation acceptable to them in the first place.

Applicants get a status page that names exactly what is outstanding, which removed most of the email exchange.

Regulated onboarding is usually slow for organisational reasons rather than technical ones. Nobody had ever written down which checks actually required human judgement, so all of them were treated as though they did.

Separating those two categories was the whole project. The event log made it safe: because every decision can be replayed with the rule version that produced it, compliance was willing to let the machine handle the parts that are genuinely mechanical.

Results