This new FinTech, seeking to revolutionise a crucial element of the card payments industry, came to Creditsafe with a challenge. The start-up was moving at lightning speed towards launch, and needed a wide range of data quickly to prepopulate elements of its onboarding solution. The firm also required data from a range of hard-to-find jurisdictions around the globe.
The payment platform’s technology seeks to solve an onboarding challenge within the credit card payments industry. High risk merchants – these are companies in a wide variety of industries – engage with ISOs, who act as intermediaries between the merchants and the credit card banks to set up a relationship that enables the merchant to take payments. ISOs analyse the risks the merchants present, and are able to negotiate a better deal with the banks for the merchants. However, this process requires merchants to hand over a considerable amount of information to the ISOs, which can be time-consuming to wrangle and then provide. Applications can sometimes take hours, or even days to complete.
“We found that friction within the onboarding process is a huge issue,” says the CEO at the platform.
“For both ISOs and the merchants they are trying to onboard, there's a lot of back and forth in collecting the documents, including emails and phone calls. Sometimes, there's quite a bit of missing information. We wanted to use Creditsafe to pre-fill a lot of that onboarding information, so that it doesn't need to be provided by the customer. That saves time for both the merchants and the ISOs.”
The platform will also soon be applying its onboarding approach to lower risk merchants, completely automating the onboarding process from merchant to bank with exceptions flagged to the ISOs.
“Credit card banks need to perform due diligence on these merchants under the EU’s Sixth Anti-Money Laundering Directive, so, these banks are seeking to automate the Know Your Customer elements of onboarding as much as possible.”