Removing the branch visit from business-account onboarding at Standard Bank Botswana

Standard Bank Botswana needed to modernise its onboarding process for business accounts such as Transact Plus and Matshelo. Traditionally, opening one of these accounts required customers — and every participant to the account — to visit a branch in person.

For business customers, that requirement carried a real cost: coordinating multiple people's branch visits, handling paperwork on site and waiting for the process to complete. The result was delay and frustration at the very first touchpoint of the banking relationship.

Business-account onboarding is where a bank wins or loses commercial customers. Every additional branch visit and every day of waiting raised the risk of abandoned applications and pushed avoidable manual work onto branch staff.

For Standard Bank Botswana, modernising onboarding was therefore about more than convenience: it meant removing a structural bottleneck between the bank and its business customers, and freeing operational capacity consumed by paper-based processing.

Standard Bank Botswana partnered with Cloud23 to engineer a comprehensive digital onboarding solution. The programme was built on Salesforce Experience Cloud and Financial Services Cloud, moving the journey that previously required in-person branch visits onto a digital channel.

Digital signatures were among the key features delivered, removing one of the main reasons customers and account participants had to appear in person.

The delivered solution engineers a Salesforce Experience Cloud site as the digital front door for business-account applications, with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud handling the application data and processing behind it. Customers opening accounts such as Transact Plus and Matshelo can now complete the journey digitally rather than travelling to a branch.

Digital signatures allow customers and account participants to execute the required documentation remotely, collapsing a process that previously depended on physical presence into an online journey.

The architecture pairs Salesforce Experience Cloud with Financial Services Cloud on a single platform. Experience Cloud provides the authenticated, customer-facing onboarding site — guided application forms presented through a branded interface — while Financial Services Cloud provides the internal data model and processing workspace where the bank's teams manage each application.

Because both products share one data model, information entered by an applicant becomes an internal working record immediately, with no re-keying between front office and back office. Onboarding progresses as a managed digital pipeline, with each application's status visible from submission through to account opening.

Digital signature capability is woven into the journey so that the legal execution of account documentation — historically the step that forced branch visits — happens within the same digital flow as the application itself.

The bank reports that the digital onboarding solution significantly reduced account opening time from days or weeks to hours. This figure is pending verification.

The programme is credited with greatly improving customer satisfaction — business customers no longer coordinate branch visits to open accounts — and with reducing the operational workload previously absorbed by manual, in-person processing.