Ambrela Case Studies
Category: Client Onboarding
Issues: eKYC Failure – Modification of Historical KYC
Client Profile: The client is an Ex Indian Army veteran who wanted to invest a Lumpsum amount for the long term.
Investment Objective: The Objective of the Investment was long Term growth and Monthly Income replacement
Our Proposal: Basis a couple of detailed discussions with the client we arrived at the conclusion that a Moderately Aggressive Portfolio would be a Perfect fit for the client. Since
Asset Allocation:
Details of the Proposed Portfolio:
Execution Plan:
Plan Approval & Commencement of Investments: After a formal nod from the Client,we started the Onboarding & Account Creation on 3rd of July.
We expected the entire process to be over in a couple of hours – as is the case usually. The entire onboarding process is digital end to end with zero Paperwork required.
Here’re the expected timelines:
3rd July – Investment Account Setup & Activation
4th July – Start of Trache 1 Purchase Transactions
5 July – Start of Tranche 2 purchase transactions.
10th July – Registration of STPs & SWPs
28th July – 1st Review of the Portfolio followed by a detailed review of the Portfolio every Quarter. Calendar Invites for the same were already sent to the client.
The Problem
KYC took longer than expected. We received a rejection of KYC on 4th of July. Reason of Rejection – The photograph is missing. We quickly looked into the issue, and found out the issue was on our side, The API that passes the Photograph to the KYC Partner didn’t work for some reason. We quickly resolved the issue and submitted the KYC once again on 4th of July. We received an update on July 5th of KYC being Successful. This is when we set up BSE Star Account for Customer and the first set of Transactions was also initiated on the same day.
The client authorized the transaction and the payment was made on July 5th itself. On July 6th we reached out to respective AMCs for Folio Details and noticed there was a delay from their side in confirming the transaction. On 7th of July, we received updates from all 3 AMCs stating “Transaction Rejected due to incomplete KYC”. This just didn’t make any sense to us as we received the KYC Success status
The Problems:
The amount was already deducted from Client’s Account and Transaction rejection meant BSE will have to initiate a refund of this amount to the client.
We still had to figure out what went wrong with the eKYC.
Digging Deeper:
KYC: We realized the Client hasn’t done any KYC lately. The last KYC was done in 2009 and the same was incomplete. This meant a KYC Modification request was required for the client – Until that is done the eKYC is meaningless. The problem was very few vendors support KYC Modification requests in paperless form. Also, by this timewe wanted to be doubly sure. Hence, we took a call that we will do a Physical based KYC as well. We took help of one of our AMC partners who were kind enough to facilitate this on our behalf – since we did not have a physical presence in client’s city. The KYC update, even though a Time-Consuming process, was successfully done in 6 working days.
Refund: Though BSE’s CRS Portal mentions T+2 (Working Days) settlement of Refund Requests, BSE’s own employees gave different timelines – all of them much higher than the official TAT of T+2. We realized that there have been several instances in the past where it has taken more than T+2 for BSE to refund the amount. This confusion of course did not help. We decided to raise a ticket on BSE platform while we waited for T+2 timeline. The ticket was closed in citing to wait until standard TAT was over. We decided to wait while constantly speaking with local BSE PoC. Unfortunately for us, the client did not receive the amount on the T+2nd day and we decided to escalate the issue on the 3rd day – BSE’s MF helpdesk got into action, an email was sent to ICCL, a couple of follow-ups with ICCL, and around 4 PM on T+3 the refund was processed.
Post the Refund, now we had to Re-Initiate the transactions. But before that, it was important to go through the entire checklist once again. We did this and after being confident that nothing would go wrong this time, we initiated the transactions as per the plan.
All the transactions were successfully carried out this time without any glitch, we initiated the Tranche 2 Transaction within 3 working days – as per the plan.
All the transactions were successfully implemented by 28th of July 2023, We also performed the First review of the Portfolio on August the 10th 2023 along with scheduling a details Portfolio Review every Quarter.
Learnings -Process Tweak Implemented: To ensure that such an issue is never repeated in the future, we have updated our Client Onboarding checklist. Now, we check the KYC History for all our clients by default through the CVL KRA Portal.
Final Words: This was a classic case of an Everyday Transaction going wrong because of a Small yet very important issue. These issues, even though small and being out of an Advisor’s control can have seriously negative consequences on the Client’s experience - Something that no Advisor desires. The whole point of putting this case study out here in the open is to tell our clients that we commit mistakes also sometimes even though that is not our Endeavour. This wasn’t our first mistake now would be the last - but we would ensure that we do not make the same mistake twice. If you are an Advisor and reading this Case Study, we hope you learned something new and found this helpful.
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