Merchant onboarding delays are often blamed on the underwriter. Or the merchant for not adhering to the underwriter’s rules. It’s a familiar story inside payment processors. Sales submits an application. Days go by. No decision. No updates. When everyone’s under pressure to hit targets or get merchants live before the weekend, it’s tempting to assume underwriting is slow because someone on the risk team is dragging their feet.
But when you sit with the underwriters, when you watch how the process actually works, you quickly see a different problem. The issue isn’t that underwriters lack urgency or don’t understand the business impact of delays. Far from it. The underwriters we see every day are operating at incredible speed whilst still being the protector of the company.
It’s that they’re operating inside a broken stack.
Most processors haven’t modernized their risk infrastructure. They’ve added automation tools around the edges like Excel-based rules, dashboards, maybe an auto-approval workflow for low-risk MCCs. But the core workflow underwriters rely on is still largely manual, fragmented, and painfully inefficient.
Underwriters Aren’t the Problem, They’re the Stopgap
Let’s start with this: your underwriters are skilled. They know how to spot red flags. They’ve reviewed enough applications to understand how to assess entity risk. They know when to dig deeper and when to push through. What slows them down is not the decision, it’s the hunt for data, calculating exposure risk and bouncing from system to system.
A typical merchant file can require dozens of pieces of information to make a confident decision. You need to verify business ownership, assess and recommend the MCC, flag prohibited goods, check for website content, cross-reference credit bureau data, estimate chargeback exposure, and validate the person signing is who they say they are. The problem isn’t getting that data, it’s that it lives across too many places. And overworked risk teams are human too.
One risk analyst we spoke to used twelve different tools in a single case review. None of them talked to each other. Each system required separate logins, different formats, and in many cases, multiple manual inputs to produce usable output. Then there’s the recording of each data point to ensure the evidence is collected and accessible for audit.
It’s not that the underwriter is slow. It’s that the processes they rely on are.
A Broken Stack Creates Bottlenecks Everywhere
When your risk stack is fragmented, delays compound quickly.
If your onboarding form captures incomplete information, or junk data from sales reps trying to rush the process, your underwriter starts on the back foot. They spend time chasing basic details like business name, ownership, or phone number instead of analyzing actual risk.
If the data sources your team relies on aren’t integrated, they have to manually cross-check and rekey information, increasing the chance of mistakes and adding minutes or hours to every file.
If there’s no clear audit trail of why decisions were made, escalation becomes sporadic and political. Sales wants clarity. Compliance wants evidence. And your underwriter becomes the single point of friction in what should be a shared, transparent process. Worse still, underwriters learn to play defense. Without enough context, they default to caution. That means good merchants get declined. Sales gets frustrated. And nobody trusts the process.
“We Automated It Already”
Many processors think they’ve solved this. We spoke with one team recently that boasted 80% auto-approval. Which was quickly followed up with “that’s 80% are approved then assessed.” They’ve digitized their application forms. They’ve automated data collection with a vendor or two. But digitizing the front end doesn’t solve the workflow problem.
What underwriters need is not just faster data, it’s structured, relevant, and explainable evidence with clear recommendations.
If your automation only works when the application is perfect and the risk is low, then it’s not really automation. It’s a shortcut that fails the moment complexity enters the picture. And in payments, complexity is the norm, not the exception.
What processors need is a system that thinks like an underwriter. One that knows where to look for the right signals, enriches partial information in real time, and makes it easy to assess risk, not just check boxes.
The Future of Risk Is a Smarter Stack
This is the core idea behind Gratify.
We believe underwriters should spend their time making decisions, not collecting documents, switching between tabs, or decoding vague applications. Our platform connects the data sources risk teams already use, enriches them automatically from a wider pool, and presents the full picture in a single, human-friendly dashboard.
We don’t replace underwriters. We arm them with the evidence they need to move faster without cutting corners. We combine AI-driven data enrichment with configurable rule logic and human-in-the-loop workflows, giving underwriters both speed and confidence.
The result is a risk engine that accelerates good files, flags edge cases for review, and gives everyone, from sales to compliance, a shared view of what’s happening and why. Backed up with auditable evidence collection.
This Isn’t About Speed. It’s About Confidence.
The best risk teams don’t say “no” because they enjoy saying no. They say it when they don’t have enough information to feel confident saying yes.
Fix the stack, and you change that dynamic.
When underwriters have access to high-quality, real-time information, they approve more merchants. They move faster. They spend less time explaining decisions and more time making them.
Sales gets fewer surprises. Compliance gets fewer escalations. And your merchants get live faster, with less risk to the business.
Rethink the Bottleneck
If you’re watching your underwriting SLAs slip, the answer may not be more people. It may not even be better rules. The real bottleneck might be the invisible layers of your stack. And more specifically, the context switching between platforms and systems to collate the full colour picture of each merchant. Friction is the enemy.
Underwriting isn’t slow because your people are slow. It’s slow because your process is broken.
Rebuilding your stack isn’t a six-month project. It’s a mindset shift. Start by asking:
What information do we need to make a confident decision?
What parts of that process are currently handled manually?
How many different sources of data are required to make a decision?
And how can we make that easier, not just faster?
That’s how you start scaling with trust.
- What information do we need to make a confident decision?
- What parts of that process are currently handled manually?
- How many different sources of data are required to make a decision?
- And how can we make that easier, not just faster
