Winning clients is tough and retaining them is even tougher. This is especially true in the accounting industry, as ever-increasing competition, fragile relationships, and dwindling brand loyalty make it increasingly difficult to get focused and consistent customer attention. Establishing a smooth and timely acceptance and continuance process is a critical challenge.
In today’s changing world, accounting firms are looking to technology to efficiently accelerate client acceptance and continuance, as clients expect faster time to value, as well as better transparency and accessibility to information. Intapp Risk & Compliance helps firms seamlessly onboard new business while managing professional, regulatory, financial, and strategic risks — from initial acceptance and throughout ongoing continuance processes.
1. Better Understand Client Risks at the Outset
An in-depth intake process is designed to capture as much data on the new client as possible. However, in the absence of an intelligent, connected system, this data remains siloed in spreadsheets and is seldom reused or leveraged for further analysis such as evaluating current and future engagements. If the data is reused, the process to connect it to other firm systems must typically be done manually.
Intapp Risk & Compliance automatically incorporates this data and uses AI to leverage past and current conflicts and independence search decisions earlier in the process to power more accurate, consistent, and quicker future decisions. Additionally, the software includes many third-party data integrations offering corporate content to inform and automate your client acceptance and continuance processes and help you make the right decisions when evaluating new and ongoing business.
2. Attaining Strategic Alignment
It goes without saying that most new clients should strategically fit in with where the firm currently is and where it wants to expand. The problem with aligning new business to a firm’s expansion plans is that it introduces new risks. When you use a comprehensive and configurable intake form that integrates with information from third-party content providers, this combined data will automatically provide risk scoring that alerts and notifies key administrators through the software. These embedded forms create a risk profile that can be customized to what you value as a firm. This automation makes client acceptance and continuance quicker and easier.
3. Automating the client intake process
When the intake process is this comprehensive, it not only improves client acceptance but it also elevates client management and control over the client lifecycle process. The more you know about your new clients, the better you can serve them from beginning to end. Automating intake allows you to be informed of any and all client information throughout the whole process and to take action when it is most needed. Siloed information becomes unified, disparate events become connected, and fragmented processes become integrated.
4. Providing Transparency Throughout This Process
Intapp uses a common data model which power shared data, shared services, and shared functionality across the entire solution suite. You simply enter data in one product and utilize that data in any other product across teams and geos seamlessly, connecting the entire firm with speed. This interconnectedness brings a transparency to every stage of the client lifecycle.
5. Ongoing Risk Monitoring Throughout the Client Lifecycle Management
Intapp offers risk evaluation early in the process to make client acceptance and continuance faster and easier. But it also provides reoccurring risk monitoring for all clients to ensure their strategic goals still fit with your firm’s plans.
The software allows firms to win business and start billing faster with automated acceptance and continuance. It helps accelerate analysis and clearance of conflicts with holistic, AI-powered conflicts clearance and manages and monitors risk with a single source of truth for local and global independence. Using Intapp, you can enforce compliance by centralizing and streamlining integrated client requirements and protect sensitive data and enforce confidentiality policies across the firm with ethical walls. It’s a win-win for both clients and firms.
Learn more about Intapp Risk & Compliance: Watch this on-demand webinar to see how purpose-built technology can streamline your acceptance and continuance processes.