AI Agents for BFSI - Customer’s Digital Onboarding Journey in 2025

Introduction: AI Everywhere 

Today, when you call your bank or apply for a loan, there’s a good chance an AI agent is involved. Why? Because human teams alone simply can’t handle the volume and speed required in 2025. Banks realized that if they kept hiring more staff for every surge in customers, they’d never keep up – or keep costs in check. 

This isn’t just hype – it’s happening. Gartner predicts that AI chatbots will handle 85% of customer interactions by 2025. In financial services, a recent survey found 36% of firms saw AI cut annual costs by over 10%. These numbers speak loud and clear: AI isn’t a futuristic nice-to-have, it’s a present-day necessity. From automating routine customer queries to guiding new customers through sign-ups, AI agents are everywhere in BFSI because they need to be – human teams alone simply don’t scale that efficiently.

Onboarding Before COVID: A Paper-Heavy Past

Rewind to the pre-2020 era, and onboarding a new bank or insurance customer was a different world. We still remember lining up at a bank branch with a token, armed with photocopies of ID proofs and a pen to fill form after form. Traditional onboarding was painfully slow and largely manual. A typical process meant:

• In-Person Visits: Customers had to physically visit a branch or meet an agent to get started.
  
  

• Mountains of Paperwork: Opening an account or buying a policy involved a stack of forms, signatures, and photocopies for KYC.
  
  

• Lengthy Verification: Bank staff would manually verify documents and input data, often taking days to activate a simple account.
  
  

Not surprisingly, many potential customers never made it through this gauntlet. A Deloitte survey found that lengthy processing times and excessive paperwork lead to 38% of customers dropping out during onboarding. Think about that – more than one in three gave up and walked away, simply because the process was too much of a hassle. Whether it was a new credit card or a small business loan, the human-intensive onboarding approach meant high drop-off rates, errors in data entry, and frustrated users.

The cracks were showing even before 2020, but then came a catalyst no one anticipated.

The Pandemic’s Digital Push in BFSI

COVID-19 changed everything – practically overnight. In India, regulators stepped up to help enable remote onboarding. Notably, the Reserve Bank of India in January 2020 gave a green light to video KYC (Video Customer Identification Process) as an official alternative to in-person verification. This was a game-changer: suddenly banks could verify a customer’s identity over a video call instead of across a desk.

Consider a telling statistic: users of mobile banking in India jumped by 99%, and internet banking by 18%, between March 2019 and September 2021. Essentially, usage of digital channels doubled in a span of 18 months. Forced by necessity, people of all ages learned to open accounts via apps, submit documents online, and say hello to their new bank “relationship manager” on a webcam. By late 2020, many leading banks (ICICI, Kotak, IndusInd, etc.) had rolled out full video KYC onboarding for savings accounts, letting customers join from the safety of their homes.

India has since become one of the fastest-growing fintech markets in the world. PwC predicts that by the end of 2025, India’s fintech market will reach $150 billion, growing ~31% annually.

Digital Onboarding 2.0: Fast, Remote, and AI-Powered

So, what does onboarding a customer look like in 2025? Banks, insurers, and lenders have invested heavily in streamlining this flow end-to-end. A modern digital onboarding journey typically involves:

• Online Application: The customer begins on a website or mobile app, filling in basic details (often auto-filled from national ID databases or previous interactions).
  
  

• Digital KYC & Verification: Instead of handing over photocopies, customers use eKYC. This could mean uploading a photo of an ID, which an AI instantly reads via OCR, or simply providing an Aadhaar number for instant verification.
  
  

• Instant Checks & Approvals: Behind the scenes, algorithms verify PAN numbers, check credit scores, and flag compliance issues in real-time. What used to take an operations team days to vet now happens in a split second.
  
  

• E-signatures & Welcome Kits: Customers can e-sign documents on their phone. A new bank account is activated immediately and a welcome email or app notification provides account details.
  
  
  

When done right, digital onboarding dramatically lowers costs and boosts conversion. 

Moreover, digital onboarding opened the door to agentless automation – processes that hum along without needing human intervention at every step. Many fintech lenders, for example, now offer instant loans where an AI-driven system underwrites the loan on the fly as you fill out the application. 

However, going fully digital also introduced new challenges. Many customers still need help during onboarding – they have questions or get stuck on a step, but there’s no bank clerk sitting across the desk anymore. This is exactly where AI voice agents have emerged as the friendly guide in the digital onboarding journey.

Retail Banking - From Welcome Calls to Ongoing Guidance

• New account = instant welcome call by an AI voice agent. Greets customer, verifies details, and guides setup (e.g., app download, net banking).

• Much higher engagement than traditional welcome emails.

• AI handles KYC verification instantly, in the customer’s preferred language - even at midnight.

• Reduces onboarding time from days to minutes.

• Banks report 30 - 40% fewer drop-offs when voice AI is part of the onboarding flow.

• Feels like having a virtual banker ready 24/7.
  
  
  

Lending – Loan Applications Made Easy

• AI voice agents simplify complex loan journeys. Greet applicants, ask clarifying questions, explain terms, and check eligibility in real time.

• More effective than navigating endless form fields alone.

• Lenders see higher completion rates and lower abandonment.

• Voice agents also follow up on missing documents: “Need last year’s financials? I can text you a secure link.”

• Ensures consistent follow-ups at scale, unlike human teams.
  
  
  

Insurance – Personalized Policy Onboarding

• Voice AI acts as a first-line advisor during policy onboarding. Explains features, answers FAQs, and gently cross-sells relevant plans.

• Transforms long forms into easy voice interactions: “I’ll ask a few questions - you just speak the answers.”

• Improves accuracy by catching errors (e.g., mismatched birthdates).

• Used even post-onboarding, e.g., to file vehicle claims.

• Builds trust and engagement from day one through natural conversations.

Why Voice (and Why Now)?

It’s worth emphasizing why voice agents, in particular, are gaining traction. Digital onboarding is great, but not everyone finds tapping on apps or reading text easy – especially in a country as diverse as India. Voice AI brings conversational ease and a human touch to digital processes. 

It can convert complex form-filling into a natural dialogue, reduce the cognitive load on customers, and make the experience more intuitive. 

Another big reason: accessibility and language. Millions of new banking customers in India are more comfortable speaking than typing. Many aren’t fluent readers of English. Voice AI, especially when deployed in local languages, makes digital onboarding inclusive. It lowers the barrier for those with limited literacy or English proficiency – they can simply talk to the system.

The trajectory is quite clear. BFSI firms that embrace AI voice in their onboarding and service workflows are not just keeping up with the times – they are setting themselves up to delight the next generation of customers. 

The onboarding of 2030 might very well start with, “Hi, I’m your AI agent. How can I help you today?” – in whatever language you prefer, of course.