Business process outsourcing
Onboarding and financial crime operations for a UAE digital bank
A digital-first bank operating in the UAE, targeting retail and small business customers with an app-based onboarding journey.
- Industry
- Banking and Financial Services
- Pillar
- Business process outsourcing
- Client geography
- United Arab Emirates
- Delivery location
- Abu Dhabi with offshore analytical support
- Languages
- English C1, Arabic B2, Hindi C1
- Engagement model
- Dedicated team with variable capacity band
- Timeline
- Ten weeks to first live file
The challenge
The bank's proposition depended on fast account opening, but its screening configuration generated a high false positive rate, and every alert required manual review. Onboarding was taking days when the marketing promised minutes. Hiring an in-house financial crime team at the scale required would have consumed the cost advantage the digital model was built on, and volume was seasonal and unpredictable, which made fixed headcount the wrong instrument.
What Corpshore did
We built a dedicated financial crime operations team in Abu Dhabi with a contractually agreed capacity band, so the bank pays for a floor and flexes upward within an agreed range without renegotiation. The team performs customer due diligence, enhanced due diligence on higher risk files, sanctions and PEP alert adjudication and adverse media review.
Alongside the operational work, our analysts logged the disposition reason for every false positive over the first eight weeks. That dataset gave the bank the evidence to retune its screening thresholds, which the bank had suspected were too tight but could not prove.
Delivery model
Dedicated team, Abu Dhabi, with an offshore analytical support layer for volume overflow on non-adjudicative tasks. All adjudication remains in the UAE.
Results
- Median onboarding time for straight-through files reduced to within the bank's target window.
- Alert adjudication throughput per analyst improved 34 percent between month two and month six as the screening retune took effect.
- Quality assurance pass rate on sampled files held above 98 percent across four internal audit cycles.
- The bank absorbed a seasonal volume peak of roughly 2.4 times baseline without service degradation and without permanent hiring.
Why it worked
The bank framed this as a staffing problem. It was partly a configuration problem, and the operational partner was the only party with the data to prove it. Corpshore analysts documented the pattern rather than simply clearing the queue.
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This is a representative engagement. The client is anonymised, and the figures are drawn from engagement reporting. We do not name a client without written consent, and we do not publish a number we cannot evidence.