Tallow onboards business customers, which means identity checks, ownership structures and source-of-funds evidence. The median account took eleven days to open and 31 per cent of applicants never finished. Every proposal to speed it up had died in the same meeting, because the only lever anyone ever offered was doing fewer checks, and the compliance director was right to refuse it.
The delay was almost never the checking. It was the waiting: documents requested one at a time, each round trip costing a day, and a queue that told the applicant nothing while it moved. So we changed the order rather than the standard. Everything verifiable from data is verified first, all remaining evidence is requested at once, and the applicant can see exactly what is outstanding.
Most accounts now open the same afternoon, and none of the controls were relaxed; the compliance file is longer than it used to be, not shorter. Completion rose because applicants stopped losing track of what was being asked of them. The team has since applied the same sequencing to annual reviews, which were quietly worse than onboarding had ever been.