Client acceptance: decide whether to onboard, and on what terms
Private banks prospect constantly and expensively. Due diligence is fragmented across screening vendors, relationship-manager judgment and committee deliberation — and it ends the day the account opens. ClientCouncil turns acceptance into a single, evidenced, reviewable decision.
The acceptance workflow, step by step
- Create the prospect. A name, a jurisdiction, an intended asset level and any documents the desk already holds — passport, bank statements, registry extracts, a biography.
- Assemble the dossier. The platform resolves corporate control, litigation, sanctions proximity, archived web presence and adverse media into one sourced profile.
- Run the verdict. Scores are produced across legal, compliance, source-of-wealth, reputation, commercial-fit and conduct dimensions, each tied to evidence.
- Convene the Council. Specialist reviewers — compliance, risk, reputation, commercial and conduct — vote and produce a majority recommendation with dissent recorded.
- Decide and record. The committee accepts, declines, or accepts under conditions. The decision, its rationale and every override are written to the audit trail.
- Export the decision pack. A PDF containing the verdict, the dimension breakdown, the vote record and the underlying evidence for the file.
Why the risk of declining is scored too
A decline is not a free action. A prospect carries referral gravity — the circle of founders, family offices and boards that a relationship opens — and a competitor holding that seat is a durable commercial cost. Scoring the risk of declining alongside the risk of accepting forces the trade-off into the open, where a committee can weigh it and a regulator can see it.
Who uses it
Private-banking and wealth-management desks, client-acceptance committees, financial-crime compliance teams, and reputational-risk functions at banks, family offices and multi-family offices.
Next: what happens after the account opens and which sources feed the dossier.
Frequently asked questions
- How is client acceptance different from KYC?
- KYC establishes whether you legally can onboard a client: identity, documentation, screening hits. Client acceptance asks whether the institution should want the relationship at all, weighing legal, regulatory, reputational and commercial consequences together. ClientCouncil sits above KYC and consumes its output rather than replacing it.
- What does a dual-risk verdict contain?
- A risk-of-accepting score, a risk-of-declining score, a recommended position (accept, decline, or accept under conditions), the conditions themselves, and a cited factor list showing which pieces of evidence moved each score and by how much.
- Can a committee override the AI verdict?
- Yes. The Council recommends and the committee decides. Overrides are first-class: they are recorded with the rationale, the reviewer's identity and a timestamp, and they form part of the exportable audit trail.
- How long does an acceptance dossier take?
- A first-pass dossier and dual-risk verdict is typically produced within minutes of the prospect being created, then enriched as slower sources such as registry filings and archived web history resolve.