The new frontier in digital customer acquisition is the business banking market, according to one of leaders in the onboarding market.Avoka chief executive Phil Copeland said onboarding business customers was much more complex than dealing with retail customers because it usually involved more than one product, information going to a number of destinations in the bank and often involved an adviser and business partners.Copeland said: "We have been building customer acquisition technology for some time. We can tackle complex projects."Avoka is currently working on a commercial customer onboarding project for HSBC and a wealth management project for Citi (Avoka does Citi's retail customer onboarding worldwide).Avoka was founded in Australia and has an office and about one-third of its customers here. However, in recent years its centre of gravity has shifted to the United States and the United Kingdom, where customer numbers are growing faster. Copeland, who has been Avoka CEO since 2002, has his base outside Boulder, Colorado."Onboarding used to be a DIY part of the banking business but customer demand for convenience is driving change very quickly. People expect that things will be simple and easy," he said."It takes time for a bank to build a system to do this. We see banks that do 40 per cent of their customer acquisition through mobiles. Businesses like ours have platforms that can be tailored and customised."Avoka's system integrates with a bank's preferred identity checking and KYC service and with any external credit assessment service it might be using.Copeland said a state of the art onboarding system uploads to any device instantly, is omni-channel and allows the customer to start a session, save it and return to it later."You might start applying for a product on your mobile on the bus, save it and resume the application later on your computer. The key is to make that frictionless."He said the amount of time customers were prepared to spend on applications depended on the product. People would answer a lot more questions doing a home loan application than they would applying for a credit card.Apart from tackling more complex onboarding tasks like small business and wealth, Avoka is also moving into the cloud."In some of the banks we work with you have book six to nine months ahead to change a process."You avoid that when you deploy it in the cloud. We use private cloud mode with no shared infrastructure."In June Avoka secured A$16 million in expansion capital. The company said it would use the funds to develop new markets and to work with technology partners to expand its product capabilities.In March the company was named one of the top ten fintech companies worldwide by KPMG and this week consulting company Celent gave it XCelent awards for service and functionality.