Challenge 

A leading Canadian asset management organization aimed to scale by expanding beyond its founding institutional client base. Despite aggressive growth targets, the organization’s institutional client onboarding model had not kept pace. Onboarding relied on informal processes and individual experience rather than defined, repeatable practices and clear accountabilities. 

Key challenges included: 

• Inconsistent onboarding experiences across institutional clients  
• Unclear ownership and handoffs between teams 
• Late-stage structural decisions created downstream delays 
• Limited governance and documentation to support scaling 

Leadership recognized the need for a repeatable, enterprise-wide onboarding model to support growth while maintaining operational rigor and improving the client experience.

Approach

CRG partnered with the organization to design and operationalize a comprehensive Institutional Client Onboarding Playbook grounded in real execution. The approach combined front-line engagement with structured operating model design, including the following components: 

1. End-to-End Process Mapping 

• Conducted extensive interviews across 15+ internal functions 
• Documented the onboarding lifecycle from selection through asset transfer and go-live 
• Identified critical dependencies, failure points and decision gates 

2. External Benchmarking 

• Met with peer institutional investment organizations to benchmark client onboarding operating models, governance and execution practices 
• Incorporated proven and relevant leading practices into the organization's future-state onboarding model to support scale and consistency 

3. Future-State Design 

• Defined a standardized onboarding lifecycle spanning pre-onboarding, investment setup, operational readiness and asset transfer 
• Established clear roles, responsibilities, inputs, outputs and decision rights for every activity 

Outcome

The engagement synthesized current-state assessment findings, market practices and future-state design into a formal onboarding governance framework and an actionable playbook. This enabled the organization to replace an informal, experience-driven approach with a disciplined, scalable enterprise-wide operating model. 

Tangible Outcomes 

• A single source of truth for institutional client onboarding across the organization 
• Standardized execution with consideration for client size, asset mix and organizational complexity 
• Reduced onboarding friction through earlier issue identification, escalation and resolution 
• Clear accountability across CRM, Legal, Front Office, Tax, Investment Operations, Risk, Finance and IT 

Measurable Benefits 

• Reduced onboarding delays driven by late-stage legal, structural or data issues 
• Lowered operational and regulatory risk through defined controls and governance 
• Improved the onboarding experience for new institutional clients through structured requests, timely updates and clear expectation setting from the outset