This document provides an overview of creating a paperless client onboarding process for wealth management firms. It discusses the problems with traditional paper-based onboarding, including frustrating clients, costing money, and frustrating advisors. It then outlines Mike Gardner's Cycle of Adoption model for digital tools, emphasizing convenience, savings, and improvement. The document concludes by offering next steps for implementation, including choosing a digital platform, uploading all forms digitally, and creating guided web pages for key onboarding tasks. The overall goal is to transform the onboarding process from paper-based and problematic to paperless, fast, and revenue-generating.

1. Paperless
How to Create a
by Mike Gardner
CEO, AGREEMENT EXPRESS
MINI GUIDE
Client Onboarding Process
in Wealth Management

2. page 1© 2015 Agreement Express
What is this Mini Guide about?
This Mini Guide is meant to be your first steps toward creating a
paperless client onboarding process for your wealth management firm.
According to research by CEB Tower Group, “A new client is almost
twice as likely to recommend their firm when they have an “excellent”
initial interaction as when they have a “fair” initial interaction.”
We want to help you create an excellent initial interaction with
your clients, through creating a paperless onboarding process.
While not exhaustive, this Mini Guide will give you the big picture
mental blocks you need to understand how your firm can transform
the onboarding process from:
• Clunky
• Error-filled
• Paper-based
• Frustrating
To become paperless and:
• Delightful
• Fast
• Compliant
• Revenue-generating
Sound too good to be true? Keep reading to find out.

3. page 2© 2015 Agreement Express
Table of Contents
The Problem 3
Diagnostic: Am I paper-based or digital?
The cost of paper-based onboarding
Gartner™ Hype Cycle User Adoption
The Solution 7
Mike Gardner’s Cycle of Adoption
CSI:
Convenience
Savings
Improvement
Next Steps 10
Conclusion 14
Agreement Express 15
Your digital partner
About Mike Gardner 16

4. page 3© 2015 Agreement Express
Part 1: The Problem
Diagnostic: How do I know if I’m paper-based or digital?
You may be thinking, “Well, we use a computer in our onboarding
process, so we’re not completely paper-based.”
If you aren’t sure if you have a paper-based process or not, take a
second to answer these questions.
1. Do you ever have to print a document for any reason during the
onboarding process?
2. Do clients have to use a wet ink signature at any point in your
onboarding process?
3. Do you have mandatory forms from other departments and
external organizations that you submit in paper form, or in email
attachments?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, your onboarding is still
paper-based to some extent. And yes, it is possible to say “no” to all of
these questions.
“But what’s wrong with paper-
based onboarding?”
There are three big problems with continuing to use paper in your
boarding process.

5. page 4© 2015 Agreement Express
1. Frustrates clients
Filling out a paper form isn’t all that bad. What IS frustrating, is
filling out a multiple page form, only to submit it and find out
you entered something differently than your advisor wanted
you to, spawning a multiple-email thread and delaying your
account opening by days.
Behind the Times
Another problem is that clients have become accustomed
to entering their information digitally, which is faster and
easier. When they arrive at their wealth advisor’s office to
find an outdated form of data collection, it does not inspire
confidence and customer loyalty, and it certainly doesn’t
make them think of excellence.
2. Costs you money
Collecting information on paper costs your firm money in two
main ways:
• Administrative hours: Data entry is expensive, and
doubly so when data entry employees have to call the
advisor to notify them of a mistake
• Opportunity cost: Every time your wealth advisor has to
deal with a paperwork, data, or administrative problem, he
or she is working outside of revenue-generating activities
3. Frustrates advisors
Sorting through data over dozens of pages of paper isn’t the
frustrating part for most advisors. Often someone else on the
team will enter that data into a CRM. The frustration sets in when
advisors want to actually use that data and find that it’s trapped
in a CRM, PDF, or paper form. I say “trapped” because you can’t
easily export, visualize, and build reports from those formats.

6. page 5© 2015 Agreement Express
Before You Get Started
Gartner™ has produced excellent research on the hype cycle for
technology adoption. Their conclusion is that the hype cycle for
technology adoption looks like this:
Gartner™ Hype Cycle
While this graph is not about wealth management, it does serve as
a fitting picture for how most wealth management firms roll out new
digital products:
1. The technology is announced, and expectations soar for improved
productivity and ease of use
MATURITY
VISIBILITY
PEAK OF
INFLATED
EXPECATIONS
TECHNOLOGY
TRIGGER
TROUGH OF
DISILLUSIONMENT
SLOPE OF
ENLIGHTENMENT
PLATEAU OF
PRODUCTIVITY
SOURCE: http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp

7. page 6© 2015 Agreement Express
2. Expectations reach a fever pitch just before the moment of
implementation
3. Expectation turns to disillusionment as users begin to use the
product, and find it difficult to use, and more limited in scope than
they had dreamed
4. Things reach an all-time low as users are fully trained on the
product and realize it will never do what they had hoped
5. Expectations adjust as users realize the tool does add some value
to their lives
This is actually something of a successful scenario. After all, user
happiness is higher than before the product was introduced. But it
certainly isn’t ideal.
How can you implement a paperless onboarding process WHILE
avoiding a disappointing product rollout?
That’s what Part 2 is about.

8. page 7© 2015 Agreement Express
Part 2: The Solution
Mike Gardner’s Scale of Adoption
Normally I wouldn’t be so presumptous as to name something after
myself, but the resemblance between “Gartner” and “Gardner” was too
good to miss.
The Gartner™ cycle is helpful, but it certainly isn’t universal. After all,
there are those rare occasions where we implement a new digital tool
and the experience feels like this:
We start to use a new tool or product with little fanfare or build-up, and
we begin to find out how much it can do. As time goes on, we find that
we are getting more and more value out of it.
TIME
USERADOPTION

9. page 8© 2015 Agreement Express
Wherever there is a “Gardner” product adoption, there are always 3
things present, which are imperative for any paperless onboarding
process adoption:
1. Convenience
2. Savings
3. Improvement
1. Convenience
Convenience is king.
It’s the reason Blockbuster went out of business. They may
have had more selection than Netflix, but people would
rather stay in their pajamas than actually see the movie they
want to see.
Your new paperless onboarding process has to “feel” easier
for the advisor, back-office team, and the client as well.
Consider your current process. You have to ask, “Is my new
digital process more convenient than what my advisors are
currently doing?” Currently, your advisors may only have to
collect a paper document from the client, at which point
a support team member may come collect the document
from the advisor, relieving him or her of any further
administration.
While a new digital process may save money and improve
the process overall, you will struggle to get buy-in from the
advisors with a less convenient process.

10. page 9© 2015 Agreement Express
2. Savings
This is the cost part of the equation: will this save our
organization money?
Of course, implementing an onboarding automation platform
will cost money. But some digital onboarding platforms
require costly IT help to get up and running, and hours of an
IT person’s time just to change one setting in the back end.
Ensure you run an ROI based on how much your current
paper-based onboarding process is costing you now, versus
how much your new system will cost you. Keep in mind the
lion’s share of a digital implementation will be an up-front cost,
with savings lasting for years after.
3. Improvement
Does it actually improve the process? Or is it just convenient
and cheap? Here are some ways you can benchmark
improvement:
• Client defection during the onboarding phase decreases
• Advisor time on administration decreases
• Surveys: advisor and client satisfaction increases,
resulting in lower turnover and higher engagement

11. page 10© 2015 Agreement Express
Next Steps
Nuts and Bolts of Implementation
How to Implement Paperless Onboarding
With high-level strategy in place, you are now ready to actually
implement your paperless onboarding process.
For the purposes of this Mini Guide, we will cover 3 basic steps for
going paperless in your onboarding process.
1. Choosing (or Building) a Digital Platform
2. Uploading All Forms into Your System
3. Creating Guided Web Pages for Your Biggest
Onboarding Pain Points
Step 1. Choosing (or Building) A Digital Platform
This is the most important step in
the process, as everything rises
and falls with the quality of
your onboarding automation
platform.
Here are some key
questions you need to ask
when selecting a platform:

12. page 11© 2015 Agreement Express
Is it easy (and delightful) to use for clients?
Does it reduce friction for advisors and administrators?
Can it integrate with multiple data sources for fast KYC
checks (and updates)?
Is it easy to update and simple to maintain?
Pros and Cons to Building Your Own System
Step 2. Uploading All Forms into Your System
Now that you’ve chosen (or built!) an
onboarding automation platform, your first
course of action is to create digital fillable
forms that will replace the hundreds of
paper document packages you have.
Your firm has tax documents, risk profile
documents, general data collection
Pros
• No timeline
• Can easily change course
• Easily customize to your
exact needs
Cons
• Extremely costly and time-
consuming to build
• Lack specific onboarding IT
expertise internally
• Slow time-to-market
• Difficult to release timely product
updates without hiring large
internal team

13. page 12© 2015 Agreement Express
questions (name, marital status, address) that must be filled out and
sent in the original form.
After these forms are uploaded
once, you’ll be able to recall them at
any time, and have clients fill them
out on a computer or mobile device
(depending on your platform). Unlike a
digital PDF, a smart form should catch
errors automatically, so that when a
client hits “submit”, you know you are
receiving a 100% correct form.
Step 3. Create Guided Web Pages for Your Biggest Pain Points
In every firm, there are only a handful of forms
that get filled out over and over again.
Advisors are practically reaching for these
forms before the client says what he or she
needs. If fillables are a Prius, guided web
pages are a Tesla.
Your onboarding experience will go from
good to great when you consolidate these
forms and turn them into guided, adaptive
web pages. What separates these web pages
from fillables?
• Easy to use: Matches client experience of entering information on
a website.
The best onboarding
automation platforms
will only ever ask for
a piece of information
once. All future
forms will be pre-
filled based on prior
information given

14. page 13© 2015 Agreement Express
• Adaptive: only asks for relevant information. For example, if
they click “single” under marital status, all the “married” related
questions will disappear.
• Accessible: Your clients (and advisor team) will be able to access
them from any web browser.
The reason this is reserved for Step 3 is because it is time-consuming.
It would take years to create guided web pages for the thousands
of permutations of forms your firm has. Only the most frequently-
recurring forms need to be converted.

15. page 14© 2015 Agreement Express
Conclusion
Creating a paperless onboarding experience for your wealth
management firm is one of the first steps in improving the
client-advisor experience. Onboarding is the first impression
that you make with a client. If you do it right, it can make
every subsequent action easier, such as:
• Compliance
• Product suggestions
• Regular KYC updates
• Client reporting
We hope this guide gets you started in the right direction.

16. page 15© 2015 Agreement Express
Your Digital Partner
Agreement Express provides onboarding automation software for the
financial services industry. We help wealth management firms become
paperless by creating fillable forms and adaptive web pages.
Still have questions after reading this Mini Guide? We’re here to help as
your onboarding automation partners.
Feel free to contact one of our onboarding experts with any of your
questions.
sales@agreementexpress.com
See how Agreement Express helped HollisWealth reduce
administration time by 500 hours a month:
http://agreementexpress.com/case-study/holliswealth-manager-testimonial

17. page 16© 2015 Agreement Express
About the Author
Mike Gardner is CEO of Agreement Express, an onboarding
automation platform for the financial services industry. Since joining
Agreement Express in 2005, Gardner has evolved the product into an
onboarding solution trusted by Fortune 500 financial institutions and
top wealth management firms.
Mike has become an onboarding thought leader with the Electronic
Transactions Association (ETA), Merchant Acquirers Committee (MAC),
PYMNTS.com, and other online publications.
He has helped top wealth management firms such as HollisWealth
Scotiabank and Canaccord Genuity onboard clients faster while
delivering an extraordinary client onboarding experience.