Customer Onboarding, KYC Verification and Follow-Up in Mutual Fund and Insurance Distribution: A Process-Based, Theory-Grounded Study of a Small Pune Distributor

Mutual fund and insurance products reach most Indian households through a fragmented layer of small distributors, yet the operational routine by which a client moves from first contact to a serviced, renewed relationship is seldom documented in the academic literature, which concentrates on fund performance, investor-satisfaction surveys or industry-level regulation. This paper addresses that gap through a process-based, theory-grounded study conducted at AL Investment and Insurance, an AMFI-registered mutual fund distributor and IRDAI-registered insurance intermediary in Pune, during an eight-week on-the-job training period (29 May to 15 July 2026). Drawing on fourteen academic, practitioner and regulatory sources spanning KYC compliance, relationship marketing, service quality and technology acceptance, the study documents a ten-stage sequence from customer requirement through onboarding, KYC verification, servicing, follow-up and reporting. The observed activity is illustrated, for expository purposes only, with a reconstructed set of weekly figures on onboarding, KYC turnaround, rejection reasons, insurance follow-up outcomes, client queries and a small satisfaction snapshot; these figures follow the pattern observed but are not exports from a formal database and are not presented as empirical findings. The illustration is consistent with three patterns: documentation quality, rather than portal complexity, is the main driver of onboarding delay (two causes account for 60% of logged rejection events); structured, dated follow-up appears to be what recovers pending insurance cases; and relationship quality compensates for process gaps (75% positive client ratings). The paper concludes that small-distributor servicing is a coherent implementation of established compliance and relationship-marketing principles rather than an ad hoc routine, and offers five low-cost process recommendations alongside directions for future empirical research using genuine firm-level data.