Onboarding essentials architecture (preview)
Onboarding essentials comprises a sophisticated collection of components that empower business administrators to compose and configure applications supporting a broad spectrum of customer and product onboarding scenarios. After the business administrator crafts the applications, they enable agents to seamlessly coordinate financial onboarding processes using a unified and coherent user interface. As a result, agents can effortlessly monitor and manage pending applications facilitating a streamlined and efficient customer or product onboarding journey.
Business administrators can configure the data collection tasks to align with the respective onboarding process, and the legal and compliance requirements. The Onboarding essentials toolkit enables business administrators to define the collection of necessary documents as required by the respective business processes. The toolkit helps underpin and validate the collected data points and legal requirements including parts of Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)/Counter-terrorism financing (CTF) processes. You can automate integrating AI capabilities, the document verification process and extracting data points from provided documents as part of the document handling flow.
Additionally, business administrators can add pre-designed user interface controls such as the Application Queue and Task Progress Bar to enrich the overall onboarding experience.
After they're complete, the applications composed and configured by the business administrator using the toolkit components, enable the Onboarding agents to effectively trace, manage, and navigate all the tasks and documents necessary to successfully complete customer or product onboarding journeys.
Architecture
The following diagram shows the Onboarding Essentials building block solution architecture.
Download a printable PDF of this solution architecture diagram.
The rest of this article discusses the component layers that compose the solution architecture layer.
User interface
The Onboarding essentials toolkit provides a set of configurable components to address any onboarding scenarios. You can create a model-driven application using a combination of predefined components provided by the Onboarding essentials toolkit and out-of-the-box platform components.
Loan onboarding is a model-driven app that uses the full spectrum of Onboarding essentials components and the Loan onboarding data model. It's a sample application you can deploy for reference or as a starter app for further configuration. Don't use the application in a production environment.
The Onboarding essentials components include the following built-in PowerApps Component Framework (PCF) controls that have configurable parameters:
| Built-in control | Description | Configuration capabilities |
|---|---|---|
| Application queue | Provides a structured list of onboarding applications ordered by state of progression to manage. The Application queue component is based on the platform queue capability. | - Select the entity to attach and the corresponding form appears to the right of the queue and displays information about one queue item.- Define Primary customer, Name, Subtitle, Date and Status to display in the application queue. |
| Customer snapshot | Provides details on the primary customer or applicant of the Onboarding app. | - Select the customer snapshot quick view form that determines the data fields and layout of the customer snapshot. |
| Application progress | Summarizes the status of all application tasks in a grouped format. The progress bar displays the task completion progress in a percentage format. | N/A |
| Application task manager | Displays the task checklist and provides details of all relevant data collection tasks. | N/A |
| Document review | Manages, tracks, and verifies all onboarding application documents by using AI capabilities throughout an automatic document journey to accelerate the document review process. | - Define the document definition scenario- Create document types- Create document definition - you can define if you want to have an automatic flow- Define pipeline steps if you enabled an automated flow on the document definition |
| Declared assets and liabilities | Manages the assets and liabilities declared by related parties. | - Select if you want to use the widget to show a summary of the declared assets and liabilities, or if you want to use the grid to view and edit the details of the declared assets and liabilities. - • Use the Applicant list component so that the Onboarding agent can easily navigate between the individual applicants. |
| Declared income and expenses | Manages the income and expenses declared by the primary applicant and other relevant parties. | - Select if you want to use the widget to show a summary of the declared income and expenses, or if you want to use the grid to view and edit the details of the declared income and expenses. - Use the Applicant list component so that the Onboarding agent can easily navigate between the individual applicants. |
| Applicant list | Helps agents to view the form information for each individual applicant. | - You can update the properties of the Applicant list control to include a Task definition Id. The Id enables the Onboarding agent to complete the verification task for each applicant using the content tab and the task tab. - Ensure that the linked Task Id provided in the control is of Verification type. |
| Task verification status | Enables agents to verify the form information and change the linked task’s status. | - You can link the component to a task. - The linked task type must be of Verification type and the Task association type must be Application-level. |
Design guidance for extending user interface components can be found at the Design best practices for onboarding essentials.
Data Layer
The Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services built-in data models are the data foundation for Onboarding essentials. The built-in data models enable financial services organizations to quickly deploy solutions using a common collection of entities. Each data model is a standalone option for partners and Microsoft Dataverse customers.
In addition to the above data models, each business scenario should expand the data model by incorporating the necessary tables, columns, and connections to meet the specific business requirements of each onboarding application scenario.
The following image illustrates the data models and tables involved in Onboarding essentials solution, their relationship and key fields for implementation.
- Task
You can download the visio diagram of the entity-relationship diagram (ERD).
These tables serve to model the task management capabilities within the Onboarding essentials toolkit. Task Group, Task Definition, and Task Navigation tables define the tasks generated for both applications and related parties. For more information on Document definition and Document request, see Best practices and considerations for Document intelligence design.
- Application
You can download the visio diagram of the entity-relationship diagram (ERD).
These tables are designed to represent the specific details of an onboarding application within the framework of an onboarding essentials toolkit. The Related Party table holds a central role in this data model, as it serves to capture and identify the various parties involved in the onboarding process. Furthermore, the Related Party table is closely linked to other tables, including those that handle assets, liabilities, incomes, and expenses. This connection enables the tracking of financial data in relation to the parties engaged in the onboarding process. In addition to financial aspects, the data model includes Document Requests and Tasks tables, both of which are associated with the Related Party table. This association allows for the management of document requests and tasks in the context of the parties involved in the onboarding process. In a business scenario where existing individual or business data needs to be utilized, a connection must be established between either the Contact or Account table and the Related Party table.
Data models are deployed into the Dataverse environment database. For extensibility, you can add new fields to existing tables in the data models or you can relate them to new custom tables. For more information, see Overview of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services entities.
Further design guidance on how this data model can be integrated to core banking systems and other master systems can be found in the Data Estate Strategy article.
Automation
The Onboarding Essentials toolkit uses Power Automate flows to automate the generation of predefined tasks and document requests. Within each unique business scenario, Business Administrators have the ability to define a tailored business process flow. The business process flow guides users through the onboarding process, optimizing their interaction with the application.
Upon the creation of a new application, a Power Automate flow is triggered based on the designated Task and Document definitions. This flow systematically generates tasks and document requests at the application level. Furthermore, when a new Related Party is added, a separate flow is initiated, creating role-specific tasks and document requests.
To enhance efficiency, tasks are linked to stages within the business process flow. So, these tasks are presented exclusively to the Onboarding Agent responsible for the corresponding stage. This targeted approach ensures that users can concentrate their efforts on the immediate priorities.
Furthermore, the business process flow stages are instrumental in categorizing applications according to their active stages. This categorization is useful and is implemented through the application queue.
Integration
The Onboarding applications can store a wide set of data that you can manage by using the application. Data might be sourced from the underlying core banking system or other systems of record like a Customer Information File or Loan Management System. This integration ensures that Onboarding agents can access the most pertinent information from various business lines, presented in a single user interface. The system of record for applications, applicants, tasks, documents, business scenario specific data, KYC, and others can reside in broad range of systems hosted on an equally broad set of platforms or environments including but not limited to the following solutions:
- Power Platform: Another Dataverse instance
- Microsoft 365: SharePoint, OneDrive, and others
- Azure tenant: Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Lake, Azure database, other data storage options
- On-premises tenant: Supported database systems and sources connectivity via on-premises data gateway.
- Other cloud tenants: Connection with establishing Azure ExpressRoute gateway or S2S VPN gateways.
- Third-party tenants: Connection connectivity with third-party services via custom connectors or published adaptors.
You can find further detailed guidance on integration patterns in the Cross-Industry Integration patterns article and data integration activities in Operational Data Estate.