3 Ways Automated Tax Compliance Can Improve Your Customer Experience in 2021

• Improve your onboarding customer experience

• Improving your overall customer lifecycle experience

• Grow your user base with superior customer experience

Financial institutions of all types are responsible for enforcing the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and Common Reporting Standard (CRS) regulations. To meet their FATCA and CRS customer reporting obligations these organisations have to collect and validate tax documentation, perform tax due diligence on all accounts and report increasing detailed customer tax information to tax authorities. 

Many organisations across the financial industry struggle with the delicate balancing act of maintaining FATCA and CRS compliance and providing a seamless customer experience. Especially considering the fact that the FATCA and CRS reporting requirements around collecting such documentation are rarely written with the end customer in mind and even restrict institutions from helping their clients fill out these complex tax forms to avoid giving tax advice.

How Has FATCA & CRS Compliance Impacted Customer Experience?

Many customers do not understand the need for providing such sensitive tax information to financial institutions and the FATCA and CRS reporting regulations rarely take the end customer into priority consideration. This makes the process seem quite long and intrusive. 

This coupled with the restrictions placed on financial institutions around helping their clients with completing these long and complex tax forms has historically impacted the overall customer experience in the following ways:

• Many customers dislike or are unfamiliar with traditional tax forms and find them to be confusing. This often results in high error rates with customers submitting an invalid form 65% percent of the time, which then leads to high tax form rejection rates.

• These high tax form rejection rates then trigger a lengthy back and forth between customers and tax operatives which often results in high levels of customer frustration, dissatisfaction and in some cases loss of customers.

• Customers often receive multiple requests from different business units, and are often asked the same questions multiple times, for the purposes of clarifying information and asking for supporting information which should have been captured accurately in the initial onboarding.

• Customers often experience delays between submission and feedback and then further delays between onboarding and accessing the financial product.

As you can see from the above points FATCA and CRS compliance has historically added a lot of friction and frustration to the customer experience throughout the onboarding process and the entire customer lifecycle.

How Can Automating FATCA & CRS Compliance Transform Your Customer Experience?

1.Transform Your Onboarding Customer Experience:

A recent report published by Deloitte, found that a majority of banks considered their onboarding experience inconvenient for their customers and investors, with 50% going as far as to say that their customer onboarding experiences were ‘complicated’. This may be because 50% of these financial institutions still had paper-based client onboarding processes in place which often result in incorrect information being submitted or the wrong forms being completed by their customers. 

Your onboarding customer experience is a pivotal part of your overall customer experience as it is essentially your clients first impression with your financial institution. By using an automated FATCA and CRS solution, you can simplify and streamline the customer onboarding and tax documentation process and capture your customers tax information more accurately the first time. Some FATCA and CRS technologies even allow for real time FATCA and CRS validation, allowing for any errors to be resolved before submission thereby minimizing rejection rates and reducing back & forth with customers. 

2. Improving Customer Lifecycle Experience

By capturing more accurate customer tax information through an automated customer onboarding process you can ensure they have a better customer lifecycle experience. Firstly, having instant FATCA and CRS validation checks during onboarding and having an automated review and remediation processes allows your customers and investors to access your financial products and get trading quicker and easier.

Secondly, similar to the above, an expiring FATCA or CRS form scenario can also result in a lot of frustrating back and forth with customers and investors and in some cases hold up their trading activity. By using an automated FATCA and CRS solution you can ensure that your customer and investors can continue their trading activity as normal and ensure that they are not impacted by becoming a recalcitrant reportable account under FATCA compliance by becoming undocumented by form expiry.

3. Grow your user base with superior customer experience

Automated FATCA and CRS compliance solutions can scale with financial institutions of all types and help them deal with the challenges associated with onboarding and performing tax due diligence on high magnitudes of customers and investors. However automated FATCA and CRS compliance solutions also have a part to play in helping institutions grow their customer and investor base, by having a key role in helping reduce bounce rates in onboarding flows, helping increase customer satisfaction scores, and ensuring organisations receive more accurate customers tax information.

How Can The TAINA Platform Transform Your Customer Experience?

TAINA’s fully automated FATCA, CRS and QI Compliance Platform has helped financial institutions of all types transform their customer experience. The TAINA Online Customer and Investor Portal provides a smart and intuitive interface which ensures that the institution's customers and investors have a simple and sleek customer onboarding and tax documentation journey. 

• Real-time FATCA and CRS validation checks before form submission have reduce back and forth with customers and form rejection rates by 85%

• The TAINA Platform has built-in IRS tips and hints for all W-Series and CRS tax forms which aid your customer and investors in completing forms without providing tax advice.

• Customers can complete FATCA and CRS tax forms 63% faster using TAINA’s No Tax Form Customer Journey which has simplified traditional tax forms into a sleek and simple questionnaire format. 

• The TAINA Platform’s ongoing monitoring of change in circumstances alerts tax operatives of changing customer tax information and form expiries so they can proactively engage with customers and confirm their tax information changes without interruptions to their trade activity

• The TAINA Platform can be integrated into your current digital customer experience or implemented as a stand alone turnkey solution 

CX Transformation Through Regulatory Technology

We at TAINA understand that automating your FATCA, CRS and QI  compliance can help financial institutions provide a superior customer experience. Customers and investors may not choose their financial institution based on their robust FATCA and CRS validation and reporting processes however they will compare institutions overall customer experiences. Therefore the value of automated FATCA and CRS compliance technologies is not only in their ability to reduce risk and save costs by streamlining the tax validation and reporting processes but they can also become a valuable differentiator from a customer experience perspective. And ultimately become a competitive advantage for financial institutions.

We would love to talk to you more about your current FATCA, CRS and QI compliance process and about how our fully-automated FATCA, CRS and QI Platform can help you transform your overall customer experience. For more information reach out to us or request a demo today.