07 / Onboarding

Onboarding is the institution's first compliance artefact.

Not a signup form. Five gates, each producing evidence a risk function can hand to a supervisor.

Illustrative walkthrough

Example data for a fictional UK challenger bank. No account is created here.

Indicative elapsed timeRegistration to supervised go-live · 6–8 weeks
Gate 01Institution verification

Bind the tenant to a legal entity, not to an email address.

The screen

Register institution

Work email
t.whitlock@example-bank.co.uk

Domain must match entity

Registered entity
Example Challenger Bank plc
Company number
09482771
LEI
213800EXAMPLE0000LEI
FCA firm reference
774310
Regulatory status
UK authorised — deposit taking
Submitted for manual review
What is established
  • The tenant is bound to a company number and FCA firm reference, not a self-declared name.
  • Every downstream identity claim resolves back to this record.
  • At design-partner stage, each applicant is approved by a human at IAP.
Evidence emitted

Entity attestation

type:      entity_attestation
entity:    Example Challenger Bank plc
companies_house: 09482771
fca_frn:   774310
reviewer:  manual / IAP compliance
status:    awaiting_approval

Tamper-evident, attributable, and included in the closing attestation pack.

07.1Design principles

Two rules the sequence never breaks.

Nothing is skippable, everything is resumable

Institutional onboarding runs across weeks and across departments. The flow holds state, shows exactly which gate is blocking and who is holding it, and never asks a bank to complete it in one sitting.

It ends with something a supervisor can read

The final step emits an attestation pack: entity record, accountability record, signed mandate, dry-run manifest and counterparty attestation, in one document. That pack is the reason a CRO signs off.

07.2 / Next

The full onboarding specification is in the data room.

Including the attestation pack format, the supervised-mode release criteria and the design-partner deployment sequence.

Request the data room