Transforming the merchant onboarding process

Our client is a leading, full-service provider of digital payment services. The customer’s objective is to make payments simple for the end user through an innovative approach to overcoming the limits of traditional payment services. 

Our client wanted to develop a new offering for the SME market, including online businesses, independent shops, small chain stores, hotels and small restaurant chains.  

The merchant onboarding process had been a slower process by nature, with client identification and the verification of company details needing to be checked manually. Overall, the process took 28 days from the submission of business documentation to merchants being able to accept card payments. 

With this challenge came a key opportunity to digitise the process with there being a higher demand for the acceptance of credit card payments in the customer’s area. 

To support with this challenge, Kainos took the lead to digitise the end-to-end process using an Application Programming Interface (API). This allowed company documentation to be sent directly to the agency to verify the details, with merchant terminals being sent the subsidiary company to the client automatically, once the regulatory requirements were met. 

Once the merchants had met the onboarding criteria, were able to accept credit card payments within 48 hours, with 80% of merchants being able to accept card payment within 24 hours. This was over 4 weeks faster than with the previous manual process. Additionally, the acquirer was able to gain an additional month’s revenue while ensuring regulatory compliance. With this, the new process provides a digital trail for a regulatory audit if required.  

Overall, the new digital process has accelerated onboarding while ensuring regulatory compliance as well as delivering additional revenue to both the merchant and acquirer.