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The Growing Need for Automation in Merchant Onboarding

Onboarding merchants is a challenging process, especially for Independent Sales Organizations (ISOs), Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), and other payment industry specialists. Lengthy underwriting processes, often taking days, and manual risk assessments introduce costly mistakes, decrease efficiency, and can lead to lost opportunities.

Merchants now expect quick and seamless onboarding experience, but outdated workflows add unnecessary steps and risks, hampering productivity and costing valuable time and resources. Many payments specialists need days to complete underwriting, risk assessments, and onboarding, putting them at risk of losing customers to more efficient competitor. Implementing advanced automation can lift the administrative burden from underwriters and risk assessors, allowing new merchants to be onboarded in under an hour.

Underwriting Efficiency

A global payment processing company, initially struggled to manage the volume of new merchants using manual underwriting methods. Underwriters often took several hours to evaluate medium-risk merchants, limiting the company’s ability to monetize its growing merchant base. With AI agents working in the background, Gratify was able to cut underwriting times by 80+%, reducing the time needed from two hours to just 20 minutes.

Gratify follows configurable rules matching the risk underwriters criteria for automated decisions, which reduced reliance on manual steps in the approval process. This rules engine allows providers to focus more on business growth and less on routine risk assessments.

Real Time Risk Decisions

When facing challenges with slow risk assessment processes that averaged 120 minutes per merchant. The payment processing company sought to move towards real-time risk assessments, ultimately adopting Gratify's instant underwriting tools to automate their workflow.

Within just one week, merchants are able to reduce processing times from 120 minutes to under 15. Automated workflows also resulted in 70-80% of risk decisions being handled without human intervention, allowing underwriters to focus on high-risk accounts. This speed and efficiency improved customer experience and helped  better serve its growing merchant base.

Onboarding Speed Enhancement

Another payments processor, was previously burdened with lengthy onboarding and cumbersome paperwork. The company's manual process took several days, negatively affecting customer experience. After adopting Merchant Gratify Merchant Onboarding, the reduced onboarding times by eight times—completing processes in just 10 minutes. This rapid onboarding allowed the processor to lift activation success while reducing manual operations.

Why Automation Matters in Payments

Outdated systems and manual processes can bottleneck the onboarding cycle, prevent scalability, and keep employees from focusing on high-priority tasks. Back office solutions, like those offered by Gratify, are changing the game by reducing human errors, cutting costs, and improving productivity. McKinsey found that a third of all sales and sales operations tasks can be automated, providing significant opportunities for businesses to enhance their scalability and profitability.

By automating tasks such as underwriting, risk assessments, and onboarding, payment service providers can streamline their processes, meet customer demands for fast and efficient onboarding, and maintain a competitive edge in the evolving payments landscape.

Are You Ready for the Future of Merchant Onboarding?

Automation is revolutionizing the payments industry, allowing companies to achieve faster, more efficient onboarding and underwriting processes. To learn more about how automation tools can enhance your merchant onboarding experience, contact Gratify for a consultation.