Two hours of onboarding per client, reduced to four minutes
Brightpath's growth was capped by an eleven-step manual onboarding process. We automated nine of the steps and made the other two better.
- Industry
- Financial Services
- Year
- 2025
- Duration
- 8 weeks
Client
Brightpath Advisory
- Analyst time per client onboarded
- 2 hrs → 4 minAnalyst time per client onboarded
- Manual hours removed annually
- 1,940 hrsManual hours removed annually
- Onboarding error rate
- 6% → 0.4%Onboarding error rate
- Accounts onboarded in the first quarter
- 340Accounts onboarded in the first quarter
Where they were starting from.
Every new advisory client required an operations analyst to move data between a CRM, a compliance portal, a document system and an accounting package — roughly two hours of copying, with a 6% error rate that compliance caught downstream. Brightpath had turned away business because onboarding capacity, not advisor capacity, was the constraint.
Four decisions that shaped the outcome.
- 01
Shadow before automating
A week observing three analysts revealed the documented process and the real one differed at four points — all four were the error-prone ones.
- 02
Rank by payback, build one thing
Nine candidate workflows scored on hours saved against build effort. We built the top one first and proved it before touching the rest.
- 03
AI where it is recoverable
Document extraction and classification handled by a model with confidence thresholds; anything below threshold routes to a human queue rather than guessing.
- 04
Fail loudly
Every workflow alerts into the operations channel on error, with a runbook entry for each failure mode. Nothing fails silently.
Brightpath onboarded 340 accounts in a single quarter with the same three-person operations team, and redeployed roughly one full-time role from data entry into client service.
Built with
- n8n
- Python
- Claude API
- Airtable
- Retool
- AWS Lambda
Client onboarding used to take our ops team two hours per account. It now takes four minutes of review. We onboarded 340 accounts last quarter with the same three people.
Automation & AI Workflows
Internal tools, integrations and AI-assisted workflows that remove the manual steps nobody should still be doing by hand.
Tell us where it hurts.
If any of this sounded familiar, the call is free and the advice is honest — even when the honest advice is that you do not need us.
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