I recently wrote an article reflecting on the eleven years since Elorn began. In it, I shared some of our history and the events that led us to build a new product we now call Onboarding by Elorn.
In my article, I used the comparison of a maître d’ in a restaurant: the person who welcomes diners, helps them feel at ease, makes sure everything runs smoothly and sets the tone for the experience that follows. It is a role many people can understand because most of us have experienced, in some form, the difference between a good dining experience and a poor one. Similarly, onboarding is often the first meaningful interaction someone has with a business. It creates an early impression and can either build confidence or create uncertainty.
However, the comparison quickly breaks down.
The reality is that onboarding is often far more complex. An application may come from an individual, a company, or both. A company may have directors, ultimate beneficial owners, authorised representatives and other connected parties.
From there, the process can involve several layers: identity and address verification, company checks, screening, questions, supporting evidence, review and approval. Documents may need to be uploaded, information clarified and agreements signed.
Often, this is not a straight line. Information may be missing, unclear or require further explanation, creating a flow of back and forth between the applicant and the business. At the same time, firms need to protect themselves, their customers and the wider financial system from fraud, sanctions breaches and financial crime.
When onboarding is poorly designed, the consequences can be felt long after the application is complete: more manual review, higher remediation costs, weaker data, increased risk and a poorer first experience for the customer.
This is where onboarding starts to become more than a welcome. It becomes the point where customer experience, operational process, risk management and compliance all meet.
A few years ago, my partner and I bought a new car. The sales experience was polished: a smart showroom, cold branded sparkling water, helpful people and immersive technology.
Then came the onboarding.
Documents to review, agreements to sign, forms to complete, finance options to choose from, identity verification, payment instructions, personal documents sent by email and messages arriving from different names and domains. None of it was unusual in isolation, but together it felt fragmented.
There was no central hub, no clear checklist and no obvious sense of whether the next action sat with me or with them. The experience felt very different from the confidence created at the start.
That stayed with me, because onboarding often carries some of the most important moments in a relationship: personal information, payment details, legal agreements, identity checks and trust. Yet too often it feels like an afterthought.
This is only one example, but it reflects a wider pattern. Long, unclear or cumbersome onboarding processes increase friction, weaken the first customer experience and can cause applicants to drop away.
At a high level, the pressure shows in four places:
The risk side matters too. Fraud is now one of the most commonly experienced crimes in England and Wales, and FCA enforcement action has repeatedly shown the consequences of weak AML, KYC, CDD and sanctions controls.
The uncomfortable truth is that there are many onboarding tools in the market, yet the same problems keep appearing: customers still abandon, operations teams still chase information, compliance teams still remediate poor data, and businesses still struggle to balance speed with control.
When Elorn began providing payment gateway technology, applicants would often be considering several gateways with similar products and pricing. I realised early on that payments was a highly competitive industry, and that for many customers it was not always easy to distinguish between providers.
That placed real emphasis on speed, clarity and the quality of the onboarding experience. Eleven years later, I think that lesson still holds. Most businesses operate in competitive markets, and the first proper interaction with a customer matters.
Around 18 months ago, we went through an exercise to open new business bank accounts for Elorn. We treated it as a project and made multiple applications to different account providers at the same time.
The experiences were markedly different. Some providers fully embraced technology. Some kept a human in the loop to discuss certain aspects of the application. Others were almost entirely manual, cumbersome and out of step with the quality of their website or banking app.
Again, it showed the same mismatch I felt during the car-buying experience.
For me, this shows the balance good onboarding has to get right. If the process is too slow, clients drop away. If it is too loose, financial crime and regulatory risk increase. If it is too manual, costs rise, but if it is designed well, onboarding can become an advantage rather than a bottleneck.
For us, that is the heart of good onboarding, not removing checks, but making them clearer, better structured and easier to complete.
Onboarding by Elorn helps businesses in regulated or complex sectors build onboarding flows that fit the way they work. It brings together identity checks, customer screening, document uploads, custom forms and reviewer tools in one structured platform.
It is designed to help companies create compliant flows that meet strict requirements without adding unnecessary friction. Governance has been considered from the outset, with roles, permissions, review steps and audit trails helping teams maintain control over how applications are assessed and approved.
Clarity matters on both sides of the journey. Applicants and team members can see the status and progress of an application, with clear next steps and the ability to open conversations where more information, explanation or evidence is needed. The applicant review centre gives reviewers one place to see what has happened, what is outstanding and what needs attention.
The applicant journey is designed for completion. Applicants can receive updates, view progress and complete key steps from their mobile, helping them move through the process with less uncertainty and fewer unnecessary delays.
Going back to my favourite topic, music: each of these tools matters, but the real value is in how they relate to each other. In music, a motif only becomes meaningful when it is developed into a larger whole. We think about onboarding in a similar way. The small components need to sit inside a journey that has structure, logic and purpose.
For us, this has fallen into four themes:
To bring those themes to life, we also had to develop our own ability to build technology.