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Key Takeaways
- Cheque retirement marks a line in the sand for paper-based merchant onboarding. Digital payments demand digital onboarding that is fast, paperless, and scalable.
- Manual merchant onboarding creates friction, delays activation, and weakens compliance outcomes. PDFs, wet signatures, and manual reviews slow time-to-revenue, reduce auditability, and increase drop-off.
- Digital onboarding strengthens compliance and risk management by improving consistency, auditability, and control. Automation supports consistent AML/CTF controls, clear evidence trails, and reduced exposure to identity crime.
- Payment providers that modernize onboarding protect competitiveness as payments move faster. Faster activation, stronger compliance, and better merchant experience now move together.
AusPayNet’s decision to wind down cheques isn’t just a payments update. It is a line in the sand. It reflects a growing consensus that paper-era processes are no longer fit for a modern financial services and digital payments ecosystem. Cheques aren’t being retired in Australia because they’re quaint. They’re being retired because the country has collectively decided they’re too slow, too manual, and too brittle for a modern payments system.
That’s the part that matters.
According to AusPayNet, cheques now account for less than 0.1% of all payments in Australia, and that cheque payment value in FY25 fell 20.6% year-on-year. This is not simply a statistic. It marks the end of an operating philosophy built on paper-based workflows and manual controls. The market has already decided. Customers have voted with their behavior, and paper lost.
And once that domino falls, the next question becomes unavoidable: if cheques are too slow and insecure to move money, how can payment providers continue to justify relying on merchant onboarding processes built on the same assumptions, including paper forms, wet signatures, PDFs, and manual reviews?
Why Cheque Retirement Makes Manual Merchant Onboarding Indefensible
Australia has set a firm date for the final chapter of cheques: banks will stop issuing them by mid-2028, with all acceptance ending by late 2029. This decision closes the chapter on paper-based financial services and the operating models that once supported them, but no longer belong in a payments system built for speed, certainty, and trust.
The language from AusPayNet was equally direct, stating cheques are "no longer fit for purpose" in an age of safer digital alternatives. That phrase now sticks, becoming a benchmark customers are using to assess every other slow, manual process attached to payments. And near the top of that list is merchant onboarding, which for many still operates with the same friction the cheque retirement aims to leave behind.
Because here’s the awkward truth: payments have modernized faster than the processes that grant permission to accept payments. Fast digital payments paired with manual merchant onboarding and legacy digital onboarding workflows are not a stable business model. It’s a churn engine.
This is the subtle but decisive shift the industry sometimes misses—modernization is no longer a product roadmap topic. It’s an operating system issue. When payments move faster, every slow, manual step that sits before them becomes a constraint. Not just on customer experience, but on growth, risk management, and credibility. A delayed onboarding isn’t just a delayed customer; it’s a delayed revenue stream, a delayed compliance outcome, and a signal that your business can't keep up.
There is also a hard financial reality many organizations overlook. Maintaining legacy onboarding processes consumes capital that delivers no competitive return. Teams are funded to support workflows the market no longer wants, systems are maintained to prop up manual handoffs, and security spend is directed at protecting outdated processes rather than enabling growth. That capital could be redeployed into acquisition, retention, and risk capability. Instead, it is tied up keeping legacy onboarding alive.
For a deeper breakdown of how manual onboarding models compare to digital approaches, see Manual vs Digital Merchant Onboarding: What PSPs Must Know.
The “Amazon experience” is Now the Minimum Viable Expectation
In a commercial environment shaped by consumer-grade immediacy, even small delays now feel unacceptable to merchants. The same people who order online, stream content instantly, and move money in real time bring those expectations into every professional interaction, including how they expect to be onboarded as merchants. Merchant onboarding is expected to happen now, not days or weeks after a deal is signed.
That framing matters, because the pressure facing payment providers is no longer about experience alone. It is about survival. This is not about preference or convenience. It is about whether providers can remain competitive at all.
Payment providers operating in digital payments are not only being compared to each other. They are being measured against the best digital experiences merchants encounter anywhere. Digital onboarding has become part of that comparison by default, whether providers intend it to be or not.
Merchant’s expectations aren’t shaped by hazy memories of 1990s loan applications. They’re shaped by Uber turning up in minutes, Netflix loading without fuss, and digital payments that settle instantly. If merchant onboarding still feels paper-heavy or manual, it does not signal regulatory care. It signals operational drag. It creates frustration and hesitation, introduces doubt, and raises questions about whether the provider can support growth at speed.
Australia’s behavior reinforces this shift. RBA’s retail payments data shows mobile wallets are no longer niche. In October 2024, 44% of ‘device-present’ card transactions were made via a mobile wallet. That experience is paperless, immediate, and seamless. It now defines the standard merchants bring into every interaction with payment providers, including merchant onboarding. When onboarding fails to meet that standard, merchants move on.
Once that expectation is internalized, it does not reset. Speed becomes the baseline. Paper becomes the outlier. When payments move in seconds but merchant onboarding still depends on PDFs, wet signatures, and manual reviews, the contradiction is stark. Paper-based merchant onboarding directly undermines time-to-revenue, trust, and competitive survival.
Why Manual Processes Create Friction in Merchant Onboarding
Put bluntly, human touch equals time, money, and friction. In a market where competitors can onboard merchants in hours, every unnecessary human handoff becomes a competitive liability.
Yet in many financial organizations, particularly across merchant onboarding and compliance workflows, human involvement is still treated as a virtue. A signal of diligence, control, and safety. That assumption no longer holds, and the cost it introduces is now impossible to ignore.
Not because people are bad, but because manual processes are variable. Manual onboarding steps create inconsistency, delay, opaque decision trails, and error. They weaken compliance by fragmenting evidence and reducing traceability. Skilled teams spend their time moving information between systems, chasing documents, and rechecking the same details, rather than applying judgement where it matters.
Capgemini’s research on onboarding found banks’ onboarding teams spend the overwhelming majority of their time on operational work, leaving only a small fraction for actual customer engagement, estimating that up to 66% of onboarding time could be optimized by better process design and automation.
In plain terms, organizations are expending skilled compliance capacity on administration, then mistaking process volume for regulatory rigour. Manual delay is not evidence of stronger compliance. It often masks weak standardization and poor traceability.
The role of automation in digital onboarding and AML/CTF compliance is not to remove people, but to strengthen control. Automation ensures checks are applied consistently, evidence is captured systematically, and decisions are supported by clear, reviewable data. Human judgement is then reserved for higher-risk cases, nuance, and escalation. Where regulators expect it.
This is what paperless merchant onboarding enables. More defensible compliance outcomes, clearer audit trails, and greater confidence that controls are being applied as designed. Faster activation is a benefit. Stronger compliance is the point.
What Regulators Expect From Modern Merchant Onboarding
For payment providers, merchant onboarding is not just a customer experience layer. It’s a regulated control point where KYB, AML/CTF screening, and audit evidence must be applied consistently from onboarding through ongoing due diligence.
What organizations experience internally as compliance friction, regulators experience externally as risk. The same manual variability, fragmented evidence, and paper-heavy processes that weaken onboarding controls are precisely what regulators are now pushing the market to eliminate.
Regulatory expectations are shifting from documented policy to operational proof, making onboarding data quality and audit trails a measurable compliance risk.
That is the broader context regulators are now operating in. They are edging back toward first principles: catch the bad actors, no excuses. Their public signals all run in that direction, fuelled by rising scams, escalating identity crime and the growing complexity of cross-border payment flows. Speed is not the enemy. Weak control is. Regulators are not interested in how long onboarding took. They are interested in whether the right controls worked.
Australia’s data brings the magnitude into sharp relief. The ACCC’s National Anti-Scam Centre reports $2.03 billion in combined losses in 2024, spread across 494,732 reports. While this reflects end-customer harm, it explains why regulators have become less tolerant of weak controls anywhere in the payments ecosystem, including at the point merchants are onboarded.
And in a system under that kind of pressure, “we slowed everything down” isn’t treated as a safeguard. Regulators look for controls that work: trustworthy source information, verification that’s performed the same way every time, monitoring that actually catches anomalies, and records that stand up when challenged.
AUSTRAC is explicit about where it’s pushing the market. In its 2025–26 regulatory expectations and priorities, AUSTRAC focuses on preparation for AML/CTF reforms and expects entities to understand obligations and manage risk in a way aligned to the reformed regime. Its corporate plan doubles down on a risk-based, outcomes-focused approach, informed by data and intelligence.
The implication for merchant onboarding is practical: if your compliance evidence is scattered across emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, and manual sign-offs, you’ll struggle to demonstrate control when scrutiny arrives. Automation doesn’t just speed things up—it creates clean, repeatable artefacts: what checks were performed, what data sources were used, what flags were raised, who made the decision, and why. That auditability is what regulators want, because it turns compliance from a story you tell into a trail you can show.
The Real Cost of Slow Merchant Onboarding
Maintaining manual and paper-heavy merchant onboarding processes ties up capital that should be driving acquisition, retention, and risk capability. Spending money to maintain services the market no longer wants is not neutral. It actively weakens competitiveness.
Let’s make that concrete.
If nearly half of prospects abandon onboarding due to poor experience, every friction point isn’t just an operational nuisance; it is preventable lost revenue. Every day of delay is time-to-revenue pushed out, risk teams swamped, sales teams stuck “helping” with paperwork, and customers quietly moving on.
And the opportunity cost is enormous:
- operational staff spending time on manual checks instead of managing exceptions and real risk cases
- compliance teams drowning in inconsistent documents trails instead of producing clean, defensible audit records
- product and growth teams constrained by processes that can’t scale without additional headcount
This is the part many organizations underplay: manual onboarding scales linearly with people. Digital onboarding scales with design.
If manual review and handoffs remain the default path, the outcome is predictable. Providers lose deals. Market share declines. And faster competitors take their place.
And regulators won’t protect you from that choice. They will scrutinize weak controls and penalize them when they fail. The UK’s £21 million fine against Monzo in 2025 for financial crime control failings is a reminder that “growth” without strong systems isn’t celebrated, but punished.
Modern Merchant Onboarding in Practice (OnBoard by MVSI)
OnBoard by MVSI is an end-to-end merchant onboarding and compliance platform for regulated payments, combining digital onboarding, KYB, AML screening, underwriting, and ongoing due diligence (OCDD) in one system.
Payments have become digital, paperless, and fast. Merchant onboarding is now being judged by the same standards. Manual, paper-heavy workflows are no longer neutral legacy choices. They are points of exposure in a payments ecosystem that expects consistency, traceability, and control.
OnBoard combines Smart Forms that capture the right data upfront with real-time risk and underwriting, and automated KYB, KYC, and AML/CTF workflows applied consistently across every merchant. Ongoing Customer Due Diligence (OCDD) ensures risk controls continue beyond approval, while audit-ready evidence is captured by default. That capability is extended through OnBoard AIQ™, which applies AI-driven intelligence to documents and risk signals.
As Australia moves beyond cheques and AusPayNet drives payments modernization, onboarding must follow. Digital onboarding platforms like OnBoard enable merchant onboarding to scale without sacrificing compliance, protecting time-to-revenue, trust, and long-term growth.
Learn more about OnBoard by MVSI or book a demo to see compliant, automated digital onboarding in practice.
Sources: Australian Payments Network Press Release 11 December 2025; RBA retail payments statistics; ACCC National Anti-Scam Centre 2024 report; AUSTRAC 2025–26 priorities; FCA enforcement outcomes.
