How do you turn a two-week onboarding process into something that takes just minutes?
Advanzia set out to answer this question as part of a major transformation of its credit card onboarding experience. As a leading European digital bank and Axway Excellence Award winner, Advanzia sought to streamline the journey for both customers and partners while ensuring full regulatory compliance.
According to Johann Blais, Advanzia’s Head of Architecture & Technology, the scale of the change was substantial. “The only common elements between the old and new processes are core fulfilment platforms and Axway.”
The starting point: A digital process with manual bottle necks
Before the transformation, Advanzia’s onboarding journey relied on APIs managed on Axway’s Amplify Platform, but still required manual intervention and overnight batch checks.
A typical onboarding case involved:
- Several overnight processing steps
- Manual review of exceptions
- Postal delivery of a physical card and contract
- Contract return and activation
The workflow worked reliably but was too slow for today’s customer expectations and the bank’s growth ambitions.
Designing a new model that protects partner simplicity
A core design principle was ensuring that the onboarding upgrade did not require partners to update their systems. A key public API used to receive leads from the affiliate network remained unchanged throughout the transition, enabling partners and banks working with Advanzia to benefit immediately without any additional integration work.
This approach ensured transparency, stability and minimal operational friction for all connected partners.
The new onboarding experience: minutes instead of weeks
Today, the onboarding journey is fully orchestrated on a SaaS platform, with Axway’s Amplify Platform remaining the single point of partner integration. Behind the scenes, the entire backend process was redesigned.
Real-time credit scoring powered by API-exposed ML models
Advanzia’s data science team evolved existing machine-learning models and exposed them via APIs to enable real-time scoring:
- Models are trained in-house
- They run as serverless APIs in the bank’s private Azure Cloud
- Decisions are delivered within seconds
This combines strong risk controls with rapid decisioning.
Digital KYC and e-signatures
The onboarding process now includes fully digital identity verification and e-signature capabilities, removing the need for physical contract exchanges and eliminating delays.
Modern, scalable duplicate-detection for compliance
Preventing duplicate accounts is essential for meeting KYC and AML requirements. Previously, Advanzia relied on nightly batch checks, which became harder to manage as volumes increased.
The bank introduced a secure customer data index based on Azure AI Search, enabling:
- Real-time updates as new customers are onboarded
- Fast, intelligent matching across large datasets
- Stronger safeguards against duplication and fraud
Once verification and signing are complete, the system signals the core platforms, and customers receive an instant digital card they can add to their mobile wallet.
Business impact: faster onboarding, stronger conversion
The redesigned process has delivered measurable improvements across the journey:
- Customers can complete onboarding within minutes and access a usable digital card immediately
- Abandonment rates have fallen, while conversion has improved
- Time-to-market for new features has accelerated
- Partners benefit from the upgraded process without having to make any changes
The transformation illustrates how a modern onboarding model can combine scalability, customer centricity and regulatory robustness.
Thinking about AI integration in your enterprise?
Advanzia Bank’s approach reflects a broader trend: organizations are increasingly combining their proprietary data with external AI services to increase speed, accuracy and customer satisfaction.
For enterprises exploring similar paths, Axway Amplify AI Gateway offers a secure and governed way to expose internal data to AI models — without compromising compliance or control.
Here are a few examples of how organizations in different industries are using AI securely and effectively:
- Insurance: Speed up claims processing and underwriting by integrating AI into decision support workflows — while enforcing prompt restrictions and consent-based access to protect sensitive data.
- Financial Services: Cut losses to scams by enabling real-time integration of multiple data sources across institutions, with full governance and obfuscation of PII to ensure regulatory compliance.
- Healthcare: Reduce administrative burden and improve patient experience by deploying hybrid AI models in local clinics, with prompt guards and audit tracing to prevent exposure of sensitive health data.
Whether you’re looking to personalize pricing, automate customer service, or enhance fraud detection, Amplify AI Gateway can help you unlock the power of AI responsibly.
Learn more about Amplify AI Gateway for onboarding and beyond.