A three-week account opening has a number attached to it that most firms never calculate.

A three-week account opening has a number attached to it that most firms never calculate.

If an advisor brings in a $2M client and it takes three weeks to open the account, that’s three weeks of AUM sitting outside the firm’s billing cycle. At typical fee rates, that’s real revenue delayed — per client, per quarter, at scale.

That’s just the financial cost.

The harder cost is the advisor relationship. The client signed. They’re motivated. Then they spend three weeks chasing document requests and wondering if they made the right choice. First impressions in wealth management are set before a single dollar is invested.

And then there’s the ops team. Three to four hours of manual work per client — document collection, data entry, exception back-and-forth, form prep. Spread across 15 new clients a quarter, that’s a month of ops capacity per year spent on work that shouldn’t require a person.

The three-week account opening isn’t a process quirk. It’s a compounding cost across revenue, client experience, and staff capacity.

The firms treating it as a priority are opening accounts in under a week.