You’ve done the hard work of winning a merchant. But what if your onboarding process is the reason they never go live? For too many providers, that’s exactly what’s happening. These issues are often the result of fragmented processes, unclear responsibilities, or a lack of automation.
According to a recent report, one in four companies abandon bank onboarding before ever using the product they signed up for. The most common reasons cited were confusing processes, unclear next steps, and information gaps. That means lost revenue, wasted sales effort, and relationships that never even get off the ground.
This article will break down five signs why your merchant onboarding process might be costing you deals. We'll also examine how B2B onboarding automation software, such as MVSI OnBoard, helps teams identify these gaps early, mitigate friction, and transition from contract to revenue without compromising time or trust.
Key Takeaways
Here are the five warning signs that your merchant onboarding process may be costing you deals:
- Fragmented systems create hidden inefficiencies: Disconnected tools force duplicate work, cause delays, and weaken merchant trust.
- Static forms and manual contracts add friction: One-size-fits-all processes slow approvals and frustrate merchants across industries.
- No management by exception wastes resources: Treating all applications the same ties up compliance with routine cases and delays high-risk reviews.
- Lack of real-time credit risk scoring leads to drop-offs: Without instant risk assessment, approvals stall and merchants abandon onboarding.
- Limited visibility across products and partners blocks growth: Without unified oversight, deals stall, partner engagement drops, and scaling becomes harder.
Top 5 Signs of a Broken Merchant Onboarding Process
A broken merchant onboarding process rarely announces itself. Here are the top five signs that highlight where merchant onboarding problems most often occur and what they mean for revenue and growth.
1. Fragmented Systems Slow Down Your Digital Onboarding Solution
A clunky tech stack is one of the clearest signs your merchant onboarding process is holding you back. When teams rely on separate systems for CRM, KYC, risk checks, document storage, and compliance, everything slows down. Teams lose visibility. Deals slip through the cracks. Your sales team feels the frustration, and merchants sense the delay. Both sides start to lose confidence.
Instead of progressing smoothly from one step to the next, information gets re-entered manually, duplicated across tools, or worse: missed critical steps entirely. This not only increases the risk of human error, but also causes avoidable delays and compliance gaps.
Managers can't see where things stand. Drop-offs go unexplained. Performance tracking becomes guesswork.
Here are a few signs your onboarding setup may be creating hidden inefficiencies:
- The same data is entered multiple times during onboarding
- Files are downloaded from one tool and re-uploaded into another
- Progress is tracked differently depending on the team involved
- Status updates are shared informally, often over chat or email
- Reports require manual exports from several platforms
These friction points don’t just frustrate your internal team. They impact the merchant experience too. From the merchant's perspective, the experience feels fragmented and repetitive, and when the experience feels this broken, merchants start questioning whether to continue at all. From the team’s side, it slows down momentum and increases the workload.
Fixing this issue does not always require new tools. In many cases, the platforms in use are valuable. The real problem is that they aren’t connected in a way that supports a smooth, end-to-end onboarding journey. With the right system in place, information can flow automatically between stages, and teams can focus on managing exceptions, not pushing files around.
2. Static Forms and Manual Contracts
Static, one-size-fits-all forms and manually executed contracts remain a major source of friction in merchant onboarding — particularly when you're dealing with a diverse portfolio of businesses. When onboarding depends on rigid forms and manual contracts, inefficiencies build up beneath the surface. These manual steps introduce friction that slows down time-to-completion, increases compliance risk, and makes it harder to deliver a consistent experience across merchant types. The longer this goes on, the greater the risk that merchants simply walk away before completing the process.
For teams handling diverse businesses across industries and jurisdictions, static documents lack the flexibility needed to accommodate different workflows, document requirements, or regulatory checks. This leads to increased workload, back-and-forth communication, and operational bottlenecks.
Here are a few signs your forms and contracting process may be holding you back:
- Forms are not tailored to merchant type, requiring additional follow-up to collect missing details
- Contracts must be manually filled, signed, and returned
- Internal teams spend time reviewing documents for completeness before progressing
- Multiple stakeholders handle contract edits or approvals without proper version control
- There is no mechanism to automatically validate or flag errors in submissions
Fragmented systems cause inefficiencies by disconnecting platforms. Static forms create a different kind of friction. They lack adaptability and fail to guide merchants through onboarding in a way that reflects their profile, risk level, or business type. The result is a rigid, one-size-fits-all experience that slows everything down.
3. Lack of Management by Exception
Not every merchant application carries the same level of complexity or risk, yet many onboarding processes apply a uniform, manual approach to every case. This creates avoidable bottlenecks, wastes valuable internal resources, and often results in longer turnaround times for both low and high-risk merchants. According to Capgemini’s 2024 World Retail Banking Report, only 4% of new account applications are approved on the same day. Meanwhile, 44% of applicants wait between 6 to 10 days for approval.
These delays often stem from treating all applications the same. Without configurable workflows, there is no structured way to manage by exception. Every application is pushed through the same manual review, forcing compliance teams to waste time on straightforward, low-risk cases. Without this routing, high-risk cases pile up, delaying decisions and putting potential deals at risk.
Common signs your onboarding process lacks management by exception include:
- All applications are routed through the same manual review process, regardless of risk level
- Internal teams are spending time on low-risk applications that could be fast-tracked
- No configurable logic exists to route applications into deeper due diligence when required
- High-risk applications are delayed because resources are tied up with routine tasks
- Low-risk merchants get frustrated due to unnecessary checks or delays
In the absence of exception management, onboarding becomes resource-intensive and reactive. Teams are continually working through queues instead of focusing where it matters most, and every unnecessary delay makes it more likely your merchant will give up and go elsewhere.
A rules-driven approach flips that. Logic branching fast-tracks low-risk merchants while automatically routing higher-risk cases into deeper due diligence. The result is reduced compliance workload, faster merchant approvals, and fewer deals lost to delays.
4. No Real-Time Credit Risk Scoring in Your Onboarding Platform
Unlike exception management, which is about routing applications through the right workflows, credit risk scoring determines how risk is assessed in the first place. When credit risk checks are performed manually, or only after full submission, approvals are delayed, credit teams spend hours on routine reviews, and merchants are left waiting. Each delay increases the chance that a merchant abandons onboarding and signs with a competitor.
Dynamic credit risk scoring changes the equation. It reads information as it is provided, assigns each application a score in real time, and routes it accordingly. Low-risk merchants can move forward immediately, while higher-risk profiles are routed for enhanced due diligence. This ensures consistency, reduces processing time, and gives credit teams the ability to focus on cases that require genuine oversight.
The impact is clear. Real-time scoring lightens the load on credit teams, shortens approval cycles, and prevents merchant drop-off caused by long waits. By removing these delays, you’ll give merchants immediate confidence in the process, reducing fatigue that often leads to abandonment.
5. Limited Visibility Across Product and Partner Channels
Managing multiple products and partner channels across geographies quickly becomes complex when your onboarding isn’t unified. Instead of tracking everything from a single platform, teams work with fragmented views of opportunities, partner activities, and product performance becomes fragmented. As a result, teams struggle to track progress, identify bottlenecks, and manage expansion efficiently.
Without centralised oversight, it becomes difficult to coordinate sales efforts across verticals or regions. Deals get tracked in scattered spreadsheets or disconnected tools, leading to duplication, missed updates, and limited insight into pipeline health. This lack of visibility slows down decision-making and makes it harder to scale operations as new products and partner arrangements are introduced. The longer these decisions drag, the more merchants lose confidence in the process and choose competitors who can move faster, costing providers deals that should have closed.
The complexity increases further when managing a large partner ecosystem. As organisations expand, channel partners often require dedicated portals to sell products and services under their own branding. Without the infrastructure to support white-label access and structured workflows, providers face inconsistent reporting, reduced partner engagement, and friction that makes it harder to convert opportunities.
A unified opportunity and partner management framework resolves these issues by:
- Consolidating product, partner, and regional data into a single platform
- Providing smart dashboards for real-time tracking of deals and opportunities
- Enabling partners to access white-label portals, ensuring a consistent and professional onboarding experience
- Scale into new products, regions, or partnerships without disrupting deals already in motion
By embedding these capabilities directly within the onboarding process, organisations gain the visibility and control needed to expand into new markets while maintaining operational efficiency and partner trust.
Remove Merchant Onboarding Frictions with MVSI OnBoard.
Every sign we've covered points to one underlying issue: friction. It slows down activation, delays revenue, and increases the risk of merchant disengagement after contract signature. These challenges cannot be addressed through manual effort alone. They require better systems and more efficient ways of working. B2B onboarding automation software like MVSI OnBoard provides a practical way to streamline workflows, cut down manual effort, and keep deals moving. When merchant onboarding relies on emails, spreadsheets, or tools that don't integrate, the entire merchant onboarding process becomes more difficult to manage.
MVSI OnBoard helps teams eliminate these points of friction by providing a structured merchant onboarding process that works across departments. It's a comprehensive B2B onboarding automation platform that helps businesses manage the entire onboarding process from start to finish.
With MVSI OnBoard, you can:
- Eliminate post-sale drop-off by automatically triggering next steps the moment a contract is signed.
- Reduce manual work through structured workflows, automated reminders, and real-time status updates
- Replace fragmented tools with a single, integrated system that handles onboarding from start to finish
- Speed up internal decision-making with built-in risk & underwriting workflows.
- Track every step so teams always know what's been completed, what's still pending, and where support is needed
- Collect complete and accurate data upfront with Smart Forms
- Shorten time-to-revenue by using risk profiles, rules-based decisioning, and automated reviews to move merchants through the process faster.
Every one of these signs points to friction that costs you deals. MVSI OnBoard is built to remove those bottlenecks and give you a competitive edge. If you want to close gaps, keep merchants engaged, and speed time-to-revenue, now is the time to schedule a demo.
