An ops director at a $600M RIA said something that’s stuck with me:
“We can close a new client in one meeting. We just can’t open their account in under three weeks.”
She wasn’t complaining about the custodian. She was complaining about everything in between — collecting documents, entering data, chasing exceptions, filling forms by hand.
The advisor’s job takes one meeting. The ops team’s job takes three weeks.
That gap is what LEA closes. Here’s exactly how it works in practice:
- Documents arrive as-is — no reformatting, no renaming required
- LEA extracts structured data in seconds, mapped to the firm’s schema
- Cross-document validation runs before anything touches a system of record
- Clean records push to CRM automatically; exceptions route to staff with specific descriptions, not just flags
- Custodian forms come pre-filled — the ops team reviews, not re-does
In practice: about 60-70% of clients move straight through without any exceptions. The ops team’s time goes to reviewing actual problems.
The ops director followed up a few months after going live. Average account opening time: 19 days → 6.
The three weeks wasn’t a custodian problem. It was an internal process problem. It turned out to be solvable.
What’s the step in your onboarding process that takes the longest? I’m curious how it compares.