Customer: HDFC Bank
Industry: Banking & Financial Services
Product(s): Tartan KYB Suite + HyperSync Unified API
Primary Use Case: Digital transformation of corporate salary account onboarding and employee KYC activation
Executive Summary
HDFC Bank needed to accelerate the creation and activation of corporate salary accounts while reducing manual effort for Relationship Managers (RMs) and friction for end-users. Before Tartan, each new corporate engagement involved disconnected data flows, manual KYB/KYC checks, and days of coordination between bank teams and HR contacts - a process that inherently limited scale and predictability.
Tartan’s integrated KYB Suite with HyperSync HRIS API enabled an automated, compliant verification layer that unified employer onboarding with employee data pipelines. With this foundation, HDFC achieved a faster account activation experience and reduced RM effort, transforming onboarding from a high-touch cost center into a reliable growth lever.
This wasn’t merely efficiency; it was a shift from idiosyncratic workflows to scalable onboarding velocity - where digital operations keep pace with business demand and customer expectations.
The Strategic Challenge: Manual Onboarding Constrained Growth
HDFC’s corporate payroll onboarding process was deeply manual. Relationship Managers collected employer documentation, performed KYB analysis, and repeatedly coordinated with HR teams to gather employee details before accounts could be activated. Each manual data handoff introduced delays, quality issues, and client frustration.
This approach also obscured operational risk:
Rework and repeated back-and-forth communications increased onboarding cycle times and introduced execution risk, making timelines harder to predict and SLAs harder to guarantee at scale.
Document uploads and email-based coordination created unnecessary friction in what should have been a trust-building moment, increasing client disengagement and eroding confidence early in the relationship.
Employee KYC remained a downstream bottleneck, backloading account activation and delaying revenue realization while consuming disproportionate RM and operations bandwidth.
Strategic insight: Manual dependence inherently undermines scale. When verification requires human orchestration at every step, onboarding throughput becomes directly proportional to effort - a poor proxy for growth velocity in enterprise contexts.
The Solution: A Unified Digital Verification Backbone
HDFC integrated Tartan’s KYB Suite for employer onboarding with the HyperSync unified data layer to redesign corporate salary account activation as a system-led capability rather than a relationship-manager–driven process.
In the legacy model, onboarding success depended heavily on manual coordination — RMs collecting documents, following up with HR teams, reconciling data discrepancies, and triggering employee KYC late in the flow. While workable at small volumes, this approach introduced variability that increased cycle times, diluted RM productivity, and made onboarding outcomes difficult to forecast at scale.
With Tartan, verified employee data is automatically retrieved from HR systems at the moment a corporate is onboarded. This triggers employee KYC workflows with pre-filled data, removing redundant data entry and eliminating coordination steps that historically added days — and often weeks — to activation timelines. Verification and compliance checks now occur upstream, embedded directly into the onboarding workflow rather than enforced after delays or failures.
For the bank, this shift delivers benefits that extend well beyond operational efficiency.
Activation speed becomes predictable, not just faster. When onboarding timelines can be reliably compressed, revenue realization from corporate salary accounts accelerates and SLA commitments become credible rather than aspirational.
Frontline leverage improves materially. Relationship Managers are no longer occupied with document chasing and exception handling, allowing them to focus on relationship expansion, cross-sell opportunities, and higher-value client engagement — directly impacting wallet share and retention.
Risk and compliance posture strengthens by design. Auto-filled, system-validated KYC reduces human error, enforces consistency, and enables near real-time compliance checks without introducing additional user friction or manual oversight.
Finally, the onboarding model becomes scalable. Growth in corporate clients and employee volumes no longer requires proportional increases in operational staff or process complexity, allowing the bank to expand distribution without degrading experience or control.
In effect, onboarding shifts from a cost-intensive, variable process into a repeatable, bank-grade capability - one that supports growth, protects margins, and improves customer experience simultaneously.
Insight: Enterprise onboarding is not solved by isolated automation; it requires a data layer that anticipates work ahead of human interaction. By shifting verification upstream, HDFC reduced friction in every subsequent task.
Operational Impact: Faster Activation, Lower Effort
The operational outcomes were stark:
Two-step onboarding that previously took days is now completed in under 24 hours.
Employee activation became faster, with the auto-filled KYC pipeline removing most manual steps.
RM effort significantly reduced, liberating frontline teams to focus on strategic client engagement rather than administrative cycles.
Instead of acting as data collectors and problem solvers, RMs could now serve as relationship accelerators, improving customer satisfaction and shortening sales cycles.
Business Impact: Predictable Speed and Competitive Advantage
HDFC’s shift to an automated onboarding model delivered measurable business value beyond efficiency gains. Faster and more predictable onboarding:
Accelerated revenue realisation from new salary account portfolios.
Improved client experience, reducing dropout rates during activation.
Enhanced RM productivity, freeing up premium resources for high-value activities.
By removing manual complexity, HDFC not only improved activation times - it meaningfully reduced operational variance that previously made forecasting and SLA commitments difficult.
Insight: When a frontline workflow becomes predictable and measurable, it can be packaged as a competitive differentiator rather than an internal headache.
Customer Perspective
“With Tartan, onboarding that used to take days now happens in hours. Our clients notice the difference - and so do our RMs.”
- Product Head, Corporate Accounts, HDFC Bank
This quote isn’t just about speed - it’s about experience and leverage. When internal teams spend less time chasing data, they can build deeper relationships that drive retention and growth.
What This Enables Going Forward
With a scalable verification and data integration layer in place, HDFC has turned onboarding into an asset rather than a liability.
Onboarding no longer scales with manual effort, documents, or emails - it scales with demand and execution maturity. This opens up several strategic advantages:
Faster rollout of new corporate products with predictable onboarding SLAs
Reliable activation timelines that improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn
Lower operational risk, as verification and compliance are embedded into the workflow
Scalable capacity, where growth does not equate to proportional increases in effort or cost
Insight: When digital onboarding is treated as infrastructure rather than a one-off process, it becomes a foundation for predictable, repeatable growth - an essential condition for enterprise-class banking products.
About Tartan
Tartan builds connected systems that help enterprises automate workflows, reduce manual effort, streamline onboarding, and improve customer outcomes across products, verticals, and business contexts.
Tartan helps teams integrate, enrich, and validate critical customer data across workflows, not as a one-off step but as an infrastructure layer.
