Underwriting and onboarding merchants is essential for growing a business. Your merchants expect a fast underwriting process and swift onboarding on your platform. Your competitors are already working to accelerate this process.
How is this possible? Through automation. Using modern advanced techniques to automate the underwriting and onboarding processes, is far more efficient and makes for quicker turnaround times, improving merchant satisfaction.
Here’s how your competitors are already implementing automation to cut down on wasted time, and how you can do the same.
Stop Stressing About Compliance
Compliance is essential, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Instead of focusing heavily on manually performing every check you need to remain compliant, take a step back. Automate as many compliance checks as possible. That’s how up and coming payment companies manage the sheer number of new merchants they see daily. Today, there are many technological solutions you can use to automate most of the underwriting checks. Automating checks can be done in a few seconds so you can get the results that you need to make an educated decision.
Automating compliance checks offers twofold benefits. First, with automated checks, your business no longer needs to waste time with manually filling out forms or submitting files. This accelerates the payment facilitation process.
Second, automating compliance checks for underwriting and onboarding is simpler for clients, too. They can appreciate the ease of the process and the lack of complicated legal documentation. Businesses can use automation to remain compliant while making the process easier for everyone.
Eliminate Human Errors
As long as a human is involved in the underwriting process, there’s the chance for human mistakes. Typos, missed fields, and misunderstandings are much more likely when a person is processing underwriting documents. Eliminating these human errors is an excellent path to accelerating your underwriting process.
Automation can help prevent these errors. As long as your business implements a robust technology stack, automation can enhance your onboarding process by removing the human potential for mistakes. Your competitors are already automating tasks like paperwork; you can do the same to save time for both you and your potential merchants.
Use an All-in-One Platform
Using multiple platforms to handle underwriting and onboarding is a recipe for errors. Patching together different systems adds new touchpoints where your business can lose data or waste time. Instead, your competitors use an all-in-one platform that handles both underwriting and onboarding.
Onboarding isn’t the same as underwriting, although they’re deeply connected. Performing underwriting checks on new merchants is just one part of the full onboarding process. Once underwriting is completed successfully, onboarding is the process of setting up and configuring the merchant accounts on your platform, the payment processor platform, and potentially various other 3rd party services.
Despite these differences, you still want both of these tasks to be orchestrated by one system. If underwriting checks are performed outside of your core system, there is a huge overhead in bringing that data in. systems can get out of sync, and you can waste time and resources fixing onboarding issues. If everything is orchestrated and executed in one platform – that can’t happen.
An excellent all-in-one platform will use an algorithm that scores all of the underwriting checks. The right algorithm will provide an automated score determining whether or not it approves the merchant for processing payments with your business. That score immediately affects the rest of the onboarding process, either by setting up specific fees based on their score, or triggering automated messages to let the merchant know they aren’t approved.
Digitize the Underwriting Process
Automation and algorithms are valuable tools, but there are still elements of underwriting and onboarding that require a personal touch. In these situations, your competitors have already accelerated beyond paper forms. They use digitized information collection instead.
You can digitize your company’s underwriting process, too. Moving your manual information collection to digital forms simplifies the process for your staff and merchants alike. You can say goodbye to paperwork and crowded file cabinets by relying on digital documents and digital signatures instead.
Automate Bank Account Verification
One of the fundamental purposes of payment facilitation merchant underwriting, is to verify that you’re depositing money into a trustworthy bank account that belongs and is in control of your merchant.. Historically, that verification was performed with the merchant providing voided checks. However, there’s now a better way.
You can stop asking for images of voided checks. Fraudulent merchants can forge these easily, and genuine merchants are reluctant to provide them.
Instead, use automated bank account verification through third party services like Plaid.com. There’s no need for your merchants to waste time or ask for permission to supply paper checks to verify their bank account information. Reduce your overhead and make yours and the merchant experience much better.
The best way to build this into your system is to use an all-in-one underwriting and onboarding system that includes automated bank account verification. When the entire process is handled through a single platform, you avoid unnecessary integrations and potential data leaks.
Accelerate Beyond Your Competition With Automation
Your competitors are making the most out of merchant underwriting automation already. Your business can do the same by implementing digital forms, automated compliance checks, and trustworthy tech stacks that handle both onboarding and underwriting for payment facilitation. Take advantage of the opportunities offered by automation, and capitalize on the true benefits of modern technology.