As a payment company, your prospects expect instant onboarding. They’re ready to sign up, but hit wall after wall. Momentum dies, and they drop out when faced with:
- Lengthy applications forms that requires prospects to manually enter their information
- Obscure terminology and business information they're not familiar with
- Requests from different departments to re-submit the same data
- Slow processing that takes days or weeks (especially with legacy systems that require manual processes)
Every extra hurdle raises the abandonment rate, and your chances of losing a high-value merchant.
But behind the lack of instant onboarding lies a deeper problem — the outdated way financial providers think about onboarding. It’s fragmented, manual, and full of friction.
When OnBoard set out to build a better KYC/KYB solution for payment providers 6 years ago, we quickly realised improving just one aspect of the onboarding process was never going to solve the larger problem of instant onboarding, and the friction customers experienced throughout the process. So we decided to address every part of the merchant onboarding journey in a single, complete solution, enabling businesses to grow more quickly, efficiently and compliantly.
In this article, you'll discover what actually works when it comes to instant merchant onboarding:
- Why traditional onboarding models slow you down and drive customers away
- How instant onboarding is achievable with an end-to-end solution
- Why leading providers choose OnBoard to scale faster
- How an Australian payment provider cut churn by 30% with same-day onboarding
Are you a payment provider looking for instant onboarding solutions? OnBoard can help. Book a demo to discover how to turn onboarding into a competitive advantage.
Key Takeaways
- Disjointed onboarding systems create delays, attrition and inefficiencies, costing millions in revenue in churned customers annually.
- Only truly unified solutions that cover the full onboarding lifecycle can cut through B2B complexity, remove delays, and unlock scalable growth.
- End-to-end solutions like OnBoard use intelligent flows, real-time data assessment, configurable risk tables, and automated decisioning to replace manual reviews, quicken approvals and cut costs.
Why Conventional Onboarding Models Are Slow and Cost You Customers
B2B onboarding for payment providers is complex, with layers of due diligence that go far beyond typical B2C flows, including:
- Managing multiple product verticals across different geographies
- Reviewing legal entities
- Identifying beneficial owners
- Validating cross-border compliance
- Assessing reputation and credit risk
- Monitoring merchant’s risk in real-time
To address the complexity of B2B onboarding, payment providers often rely on a tangled mix of commercial solutions. This ad hoc approach reflects the absence of a unified platform capable of managing the full onboarding lifecycle from end to end.
For example, payment providers will often build their own application forms for data collection in CRMs like Salesforce, Zoho or Hubspot.
Often, providers build their own application forms inside CRMs like Salesforce, Zoho, or HubSpot. Then they bolt on credit report solutions to assess risk, followed by separate platforms for anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) compliance. Finally, they add data repositories to store information — all while trying to manually stitch these disconnected systems together.
But this fragmented setup fails to solve the core issue: customer attrition. Instead of speeding things up, it creates new friction and slows the entire onboarding flow. The consequences are serious:
- Increased delays driven by manual reviews and back-and-forth between departments, which frequently forces customers to re-submit the same information multiple times, leading to fatigue, frustration, and drop offs.
- Operational inefficiencies (e.g., duplicated data, internal misalignment), which introduce friction and block growth.
- Heightened security and compliance risks that come from collecting and storing sensitive data in CRMs.
- Higher costs, caused by constant integration maintenance, platform updates and troubleshooting by already-stretched IT and security teams.
The result? A process that’s slow, expensive, and frustrating — not just for your teams, but for every prospect who’s trying to do business with you.
B2B payment customers also carry a higher lifetime value than a B2C prospect. So, if a new client is worth $1 million and you onboard 10 clients per month and lose 20% to churn, this friction costs you $2 million a year in revenue.
Most payment providers don’t see the silent killer: every disjointed system, every delay, pushes merchants to walk straight into a competitor’s arms. Only a complete end-to-end solution gives you the speed and seamless experience today’s merchants demand.
Instant Onboarding is Achievable with End-to-End Solutions
Why does this mess persist? Because too many payment providers still treat onboarding as a series of siloed tasks, not a single, connected journey.
The fix? Treat onboarding as one connected journey — not scattered handoffs. That’s how you reduce risk, cut delays, and keep customers moving forward.
A true end-to-end solution creates a seamless onboarding flow, covering every step from sales to compliance:
- Dynamic application forms and data capture
- White labelled offer and contract generation
- Real-time identity and business verification
- Automated KYC/AML screening and risk assessment
- Centralised and compliant data collection
- Instant decision-making
- Ongoing risk monitoring
With a single, automated workflow, you unlock powerful gains:
- Decrease onboarding time by reducing manual reviews and shortening decision-making from days to minutes
- Reduce friction by eliminating redundant data entry and back-and-forth communication between different departments and merchants
- Ensure audit readiness with real time checks and secure, auditable documentation
- Save on operational costs by running a single system with automated workflows means less IT maintenance and fewer human interactions needed
- Enhance customer satisfaction and retention through a seamless onboarding journey that’s fast, smooth, and built around their needs
- Accelerate time to revenue as merchants deals close faster and merchants go live sooner
An end-to-end solution built for payment providers also covers complex customer requirements, from beneficial ownership checks and entity identification to geo-specific compliance requirements. This fulfills cross-departmental requirements and improves pipeline performance.
Why Payment Providers Choose OnBoard for Instant Onboarding
With OnBoard by MVSI, payment providers and financial institutions can replace fragmented systems with a single, no-code, ready-to-deploy solution designed for frictionless merchant onboarding.
OnBoard removes the need for in-house builds and painful integrations, helping payment providers, acquirers, ISOs and banks:
- Speed up product launches
- Reduce onboarding costs
- Decrease customer attrition
- Scale faster without adding complexity
Payment providers can configure and implement OnBoard in weeks,not months, unlike in-house builds. As an out-of-the-box solution, OnBoard also integrates existing product, risk, and compliance frameworks, curbing the costs of technical integrations needed in homegrown solutions.
Leading global payment providers like Fiserv, Beyond Payments, and Novatti trust OnBoard to help them drive growth through fast, scalable and compliant onboarding.
Here's how partnering with OnBoard can help transform slow onboarding processes into fast, scalable systems :
Replace 23 Tools to Boost Conversions by 35%
Integrating multiple software systems is complex and often unreliable, leading to delays, data silos, and friction across the onboarding journey.
OnBoard replaces up to 23 disparate systems, including offer and contract generation, underwriting and risk, prospect and case management, compliance, and fraud detection.
Smart Forms power the unified experience—intelligent application forms that adapt in real time and personalise every step of the onboarding flow:
- Generating custom offers and contracts in minutes
- Capturing prospect data for all departments—sales, compliance, risk, underwriting, and fraud
- Auto-filling fields based on entered data and tailoring the onboarding path in real time, while reducing redundant data requests
- Validating information instantly to flag errors, prompt corrections, or request additional documentation in real-time
- Enabling documentation uploads and digital signatures
In addition, Smart Forms can integrate into any CRM or application via an open API to store an automated audit trail. The result is a frictionless onboarding experience that guides customers through each step, with real-time data syncing and built-in transparency that builds trust and reduces drop-offs.
Book a demo to see Smart Forms in action.
OnBoard improves coordination across onboarding teams by streamlining critical steps. Here’s how each team is supported: :
- Sales teams can accelerate customer activation by customising unlimited white- label offers in minutes, while automating customer engagement and internal communications.
- Fraud and risk teams can rely on real-time dynamic risk and decisioning engines to evaluate brand, credit, and fraud risk, and make pass or fail decisions—teams receive automated alerts only when there are exceptions.
- Compliance teams can ensure regulatory coverage with automated AML and regulatory checks, secure, cloud-based audit trails, and zero manual documentation processing.
OnBoard in Action
One of our clients, a digital point of sale provider, achieved same-day merchant onboarding with OnBoard. By automating the entire sign-up process, and unifying their prospect-to-customer view, they unlocked measurable results:
- Reduced onboarding team size by 6 headcount
- Accelerated time-to-activation by 12 days
- Lowered abandonment rates by 30%
This isn’t just operational efficiency — it’s a competitive advantage. With OnBoard, payment providers cut costs, eliminate manual bottlenecks, and gain full control over a faster, frictionless onboarding lifecycle.
Contact us to explore how OnBoard can align your teams and unlock scalable growth.
Cut Costs by 60% with Real-Time Data and Automation
Applications often stall as they pass through legal, credit, risk and compliance teams. This slows momentum, creates frustration for prospects, and drives up onboarding costs as volumes increase.
OnBoard replaces this complexity with real-time data assessments and automated decisioning to onboard customers in minutes. Our unified solution collects and evaluates every required data point, limiting human interaction, speeding up approvals, and cutting processing costs by up to 60%.
So, if you're paying $1 million for multiple tools, OnBoard could save you $600k.
Our risk and decision engines work in sync to:
- Evaluate data in real time
- Approve or reject applications
- Flag exceptions for manual reviews
OnBoard's management by exception is based on pre-configure rules, enabling the risk engine to automatically:
- Identify an exception and route it to the right department
- Assess which team member has capacity and assign it to them
- Continues the flow once resolved
Say a merchant applies for embedded payments. The risk engine auto-approves legal checks but flags a credit concern. It routes the case to an available credit analyst. Once approved, the system checks for any additional reviews. If none is needed, it finalises the approval.
That’s how complex B2B onboarding gets done in minutes, not days, with OnBoard.
Unlike many onboarding solutions with standard risk profiles, OnBoard is highly customisable, enabling you to define what risk looks like.
If you can describe a risk, OnBoard can measure it.
You can create rules around prepayment exposure, profitability risk, specific keywords and more, for any department, product, and jurisdiction. As risk thresholds are met or exceeded, the system flags and routes exceptions. No need for fragmented KYC/KYB tools or manual workarounds.
OnBoard enables you to simplify your workload by instantly processing data and automating exception management to speed up the onboarding flow and reduce workloads.
Real Results: 30% Churn Reduction with Same-Day Onboarding
A leading Australian financial institution knew its slow, manual onboarding process was costing deals, and risking irrelevance in a market dominated by faster-moving players like Stripe and Square. Despite being a national leader in payment terminals, their prospect-to-customer turnaround time couldn’t keep up.
They turned to OnBoard, the only fully unified onboarding platform built for speed, compliance, and scale. It gave them:
- Complete pipeline visibility, from prospect to approved customer
- Full control over the entire onboarding journey
Within weeks, the payments provider rolled out:
- Dedicated application forms for their entire product range
- Automated offer and contract generation
- Instant compliance checks and real-time credit and risk approvals
The results:
- Same-day onboarding
- 30% drop in abandonment rates
- A landmark deal with a major telecom, enabling 300+ retail stores to onboard merchants and activate terminals on the spot
By transforming the digital onboarding experience, OnBoard helped this provider stay competitive, and made same-day activation a new standard.
Choose OnBoard for Faster Onboarding
Fragmented systems and manual reviews riddle your B2B onboarding with friction. But this does more than just prevent instant onboarding. It drives away high-value customers and increases costs.
OnBoard offers a smarter, faster, and fully automated solution designed specifically for payment providers. From real-time risk assessment to configurable exception handling, OnBoard takes the friction out of your onboarding flows, so you can reduce churn and costs, and accelerate time to revenue.
Losing prospects at the first step? OnBoard turns onboarding from a bottleneck into your biggest growth lever. Book a demo and see it in action.
