Split ownership
The RM owns the client, product owns the structure, risk owns the approval. Nobody owns the cycle, so the gaps between them belong to nobody.
Financial Services
The regulator set part of the cycle. You added the rest.
Long sales cycles in financial services pass as the price of compliance: KYC, credit committee, four sign-offs on every mandate. Nothing looks broken, so nobody counts the weeks that were never required.
Sector read
Each step made sense. The wait did not.
In a company like this, a corporate lending deal takes fourteen weeks. Compliance needed nine days of it. The other eighty-nine were the relationship manager waiting for product, product waiting for risk, and risk waiting for a document the RM had held since week two. Each handover made sense to the person making it. Nobody owned the fourteen weeks.
Relationship, product and risk each touch the mandate, and compliance meets it after its shape is fixed. Controls keep the file orderly without making the wait visible, so the whole cycle is charged to regulation before anyone has checked how much of it the regulator asked for. Wallet share is in the plan every year. The route to it was never built.
Where the time collects
Necessary control and avoidable delay look alike from outside.
Both produce a long cycle and a complete file. Telling them apart comes first; until it is done, no delay can be priced.
- 01 · Surface · what gets reported
Long deals read as compliance
The delay is put down to regulation before anyone separates the queue from the wait.
- 02 · Structure · what produces it
Relationship, product and risk each own a piece
None of them owns the deal as it moves between the pieces.
- 03 · System · where it breaks
Process makes everything look orderly
Controls make it clear to an auditor and unclear to the people running it.
- 04 · Consequence · what it costs
Time and deals go missing at sign-off
Necessary control and avoidable delay are never separated, so neither is managed.
The cause and the cost rarely show up in the same place.
What the Diagnosis reads here
Where each mandate waited, and on whom.
Sign-off timestamps, deal timelines and the exception log, read beside what RM, product and risk each say. The regulator's days are subtracted first; what remains is priced at your own salaries.
- Relationship, product and risk
- Compliance and operations
- Deal desk and pricing exceptions
- Deal timelines
- Commission and incentive plans
- Exception paths and sign-off timestamps
Layered sign-off is this sector's own shape; the wallet share planned and never built is the leak the customer success page reads as expansion nobody owns.
What tends to break first
Nobody owns the deal between the sign-offs.
Process discipline keeps the file orderly long after the deal has stalled. The leak collects at the borders between the teams that each own a piece of it.
Sign-off handovers
Time and mandates go missing at the handover to credit committee. The queue in front of it is on nobody's dashboard, so it is never shortened.
Where the delay sits
Compliance gets the blame for the whole cycle. Part of that is fair. The weeks your teams spent waiting on each other are filed under the same heading and never reopened.
What the record shows
The file records that every step happened, not whether the mandate deserved to pass it. A complete file and a good decision are different things, and only one of them is audited.
The evidence
The wait, in the sector's own numbers.
Onboarding time, lost clients, bank switching and hidden cost, measured by the people whose job it is. The weeks between your own sign-offs are in none of them; those come from your timestamps.
- 01
95 days
The average time banks took to complete a KYC review for a corporate client in 2023, up from 84 days in 2022, at an average cost of $2,598 a review: the part of the cycle the regulator asks for, measured.
Fenergo, KYC Trends Report 2023, 1,100+ C-level executives at corporate and institutional banks, vendor survey, 15 November 2023
- 02
67%
The share of banks worldwide that have lost clients to slow or inefficient onboarding, up from 48% a year earlier: the mandate that waited went somewhere.
Fenergo, Global KYC Trends in 2024 for Banking, 450+ C-suite executives at corporate and institutional banks, vendor survey, 2024
- 03
33%
The share of US middle-market companies planning to switch banks in the coming year or open to an approach from another provider: the relationship your wallet-share plan rests on is already on the market.
Crisil Coalition Greenwich, Greenwich Market Pulse, 766 business owners and executives at US middle-market companies and small businesses, 2 December 2025
- 04
EUR 18,000 per person
What ISEOR measured in a bank: hidden costs of EUR 18,000 per person per year, 45% of payroll, and marked by the author as under-estimated within the time allowed.
ISEOR, Savall, "An updated presentation of the socio-economic management model", Journal of Organizational Change Management 16(1), Table I, p. 34, 2003
What happens next
Start with the Diagnosis; two other doors stay open.
Diagnosis
€15,000 flat · two months from the day we get access
RMs, product and risk interviewed; the sign-off timestamps read beside them. You leave with the wait between your own teams priced at the salaries behind each queue, apart from the days the regulator asked for.
Book a strategy callDetails →Operation
€50,000 more within 30 days of the Diagnosis briefing · €65,000 with it included
Nine months giving the cycle an owner, one handover at a time, each change dated and the cycle read against week one.
Explore Operation →Executive Workshop
Three hours, up to ten people from relationship, product, risk and compliance, one delay named before a single file is opened. €5,000, credited in full against a Diagnosis or an Operation booked within 30 days.
Explore the Workshop → FAQ
Before you assume the cycle is just how it is.
How do you separate a regulatory requirement from a step that just grew there?
From the interviews and the procedure documents. A regulatory step has a rule or a policy behind it that someone can point to. A step added for other reasons rarely has an origin anyone can name when you trace it back.
Our sales cycle is long by design, does the Diagnosis account for that?
Yes. It measures you against your own process, not against a faster sector, so a mandate that takes long for good reasons is not mistaken for a broken one.
Multiple departments touch every deal here, who gets interviewed?
Relationship managers, product partners and risk, usually with compliance and the deal desk, since the handovers between them are where this sector leaks. You sign off the list before interviews start.
How is client and deal data handled?
Under confidentiality terms agreed before any record is opened: handled securely, read only for the finding, and never reused outside the work without written permission.
Get started
The weeks between the sign-offs have a price.
Thirty minutes on the last mandate that ran long: where the weeks went, which were required, and whether your timestamps can show it. Where the timestamps are missing, that is the first finding.