KYB for Merchant Onboarding: A Guide for Payment Providers

KYB onboarding is more than a compliance checkbox. It is the moment that can make or break a deal for payment providers. If you have ever watched a promising merchant stall, or walk away entirely because onboarding was too slow or complicated, you know the pain. Sales blames compliance. Compliance blames bad data or disconnected tools. Prospects lose patience and revenue walks out the door.

Know Your Business (KYB) is the process of verifying businesses to mitigate the risk of financial crime, fraud, and money laundering. Yet for payment providers, KYB presents significant challenges:

• Connecting to multiple databases and online sources through separate APIs fragments data collection and processing, leading to data silos.
  

• The high volume of data entry, along with repeated requests for business information already submitted, overwhelms prospects and sours the customer experience.
  

• Manually reviewing data across several departments is time consuming, which increases operational overhead and friction between onboarding teams.
  

But what if you could turn onboarding from your bottleneck into your biggest advantage?

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Key Takeaways

• Fragmented KYB workflows frustrate merchants and slow down revenue. A unified journey removes delays and cuts attrition.
• End-to-end automation makes compliance faster and lighter, reducing manual work and helping you activate merchants sooner.
• Choosing the right onboarding platform is a strategic decision. Build your case around faster activation, stronger compliance, and scalable growth.
• MVSI OnBoard enabled Nayax Australia to onboard 8,000+ merchants quickly and compliantly, showing how a unified KYB solution drives real results

Do not let legacy systems orpiecemeal KYB tools slow your growth. See how a unified onboarding platform transforms compliance from a roadblock to a revenue driver

Book a demo with OnBoard.

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What to Take Into Account for KYB in Merchant Onboarding 

Know Your Business (KYB) onboarding is the backbone of customer due diligence, but it is often misunderstood or used interchangeably with Know Your Customer (KYC). While KYC focuses on verifying the identity of individual customers, KYB is a more complex process: it involves verifying a business client's identity, ownership structure, legitimacy, and risk profile as part of merchant onboarding.

KYB onboarding means collecting, validating, and reviewing a wide range of documents and data including company registrations, beneficial ownership, directorships, and more, to meet regulatory, fraud, and operational requirements. The goal is to ensure only legitimate businesses join your ecosystem.

For most payment providers, KYB onboarding is a source of friction, complexity, and customer churn. KYB involves checking legal entities, navigating multi-layered ownership, assessing fraud risk, and meeting evolving regulatory obligations across different jurisdictions. Each step introduces additional documentation, risk factors, and potential roadblocks, making the journey far more demanding than standard KYC checks.

Key pain points include:

• Information overload: From business registration and UBOs to supporting documents and related individuals, every application adds more steps and checks.
  
• Regulatory and scheme complexity: You are not just juggling AML and KYC laws, but also the unique risk appetites of Visa, Mastercard, and other card schemes.
  
• Manual, repetitive work: Each department, such as sales, risk, compliance, and legal, handles data separately, duplicating requests and stretching timelines.
  
• Customer attrition: Every handover or repeated data request is a chance to lose your prospect to a faster competitor.

For corporate clients with complex structures, onboarding can drag out for weeks or even months.

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How Does the KYB Merchant Onboarding Process Work?

For most payment providers, KYB onboarding is not a single process. It is a patchwork.

• One tool for KYB checks
  
• Another for application forms
  
• Another for risk assessment
  
• Spreadsheets, emails, and manual workflows everywhere
  
  

Every disconnected tool adds friction, delays, and data silos.

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How Manual KYB Onboarding Works

After the sales team draws up the offer and the customer agrees, the KYB onboarding process begins. However, in most organisations, this is where things become fragmented and inefficient:

• Gathering information: Sales sends out generic application forms and helps collect basic business details. This step often requires back-and-forth communication to fill gaps, creating early delays and frustration.
  
  
• Verifying the business and legal structure: Risk and compliance teams manually check company details through public registries. Legal departments review entity types and supporting documents. Delays are common, especially for businesses with complex corporate structures or international elements.
  
  
• Screening UBOs and related individuals: Teams identify and screen ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs), directors, and signatories, often using separate tools for sanctions, politically exposed persons (PEP), and media checks. This manual data collection is time-consuming and prone to errors.
  
  
• Complying with regulations and assessing risk: Compliance teams must check jurisdiction-specific rules and card scheme requirements. Risk, legal, and compliance all assess fraud, credit, and reputational risks, but often duplicate their efforts because data and workflows are siloed.
  
  
• Finalising the onboarding process: Once all checks are completed, legal drafts contracts, operations sets up the account, sales re-engages, and support prepares for onboarding. Each of these steps involves additional handovers and repeated requests for information, causing more friction.
  
  

As a result, prospects often drop out mid-way. They become frustrated by repeated requests, long wait times, or unclear next steps. This leads to high attrition and increased operational overhead across risk, compliance, legal, and sales teams.

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Why Do Point Solutions Fall Short?

Most teams searching for “KYB onboarding” are looking for a tool to solve their pain, maybe better KYB checks or a slicker identity verification process.

But here is the truth.

Fragmented, point solutions only fix one link in a broken chain.

• You patch KYB, but sales or risk still chase documents.
  
• You automate risk, but compliance still fights manual lookups.
  
• You upgrade compliance, but onboarding still drags due to legal handovers.
  
  

To truly eliminate friction, you need a unified platform that connects every step and team.

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How Automated KYB Onboarding Works with an End-to-End Solution like OnBoard

With an end-to-end automated onboarding platform, the process becomes seamless and intuitive:

• Sales teams use pre-configured templates or customise offers. Once the proposal is accepted, the automated KYB onboarding process is triggered.
  
  
• Dynamic Smart Forms automatically adapt to the applicant’s business type. For instance, a partnership will be prompted to upload a partnership agreement to identify all partners. Irrelevant questions are filtered out, removing the need for manual intervention. OnBoard’s Smart Forms automatically adapt to each applicant’s business type, jurisdiction, and answers. Prospects are only shown questions and document requests relevant to them, which eliminates form fatigue and streamlines completion. This targeted approach helps increase form completion rates and reduces abandonment, a crucial factor for payment providers dealing with complex onboarding requirements.
  
  
• Real-time data validation occurs via a single API connected to thousands of registries. OnBoard pulls official data, such as company registration and director information, and cross-checks it automatically with the data submitted, reducing errors and eliminating back-and-forth requests.
  
  
• Built-in AML/KYC functionality screens individuals against sanctions lists, PEP databases, and adverse media sources. There is no need for separate tools or manual entry.
  
  
• Automated, cross-departmental workflows ensure all risk, compliance, and fraud teams get the information they need right from the start, removing delays caused by sequential or siloed reviews.
  
  
• Low-risk cases are auto-approved through configurable, rules-based decision engines. High-risk cases are automatically flagged and routed to the right team members, based on workload and area of expertise, minimising bottlenecks.
  
  
• Centralised record keeping means every action, document, and decision is stored in one place, making audits, compliance reporting, and cross-team collaboration seamless.
  
  
• Auto-generated contracts complete the final step. Legal documents are automatically populated and delivered in real time, with no manual delays.
  
  
• Ongoing customer due diligence runs on autopilot, with configurable checks and review frequency, enabling real-time compliance monitoring on active customers.

The difference is night and day.

‍Manual onboarding leads to attrition and slow revenue. Automated, end-to-end onboarding delivers faster approvals, fewer drop-offs, and a better experience for everyone.

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What to Consider When Selecting a KYB Merchant Onboarding Solution 

Do not settle for a tool that just adds another layer to your stack. Look for:

• Unified data orchestration, aggregating all compliance data, such as registries, sanctions, credit, fraud, and PEPs, through a single, secure API.
  

• Dynamic, intelligent forms that tailor the onboarding journey to every business type and jurisdiction, reducing unnecessary data entry.
  

• Global coverage with geo-sensitive workflows that adapt to local rules and languages, which is critical for fast-moving, cross-border payments.
  

• Automation at every step, providing end-to-end process automation from sales offer to compliance to contract generation, with audit-ready records.‍

• Configurable risk engines that adapt thresholds, triggers, and exceptions to your business needs. No more false positives or missed risks.

• Scalability, so you can handle high volumes and complex business models with confidence.

How MVSI OnBoard Delivers End-to-End Automated KYB

OnBoard by MVSI is a unified onboarding platform designed for the full onboarding lifecycle, replacing up to 23 different tools and bringing compliance, sales, legal, and risk together in a single, automated solution for payment providers and financial institutions.

With OnBoard, you get:

• A single interface for all onboarding tasks, meaning no more data silos or endless email chains
  

• Configurable, dynamic workflows that adapt in real-time
  

• Unified, global API integration, with real-time checks against registries, PEP lists, fraud, and credit data worldwide
  

• Powerful, rules-based decision engines that automate up to 70 percent of onboarding workflow.
  

• Instant, audit-ready recordkeeping for compliance and reporting
  

• Faster go-live, higher conversions, and lower drop-off rates
  
  

With a single API integration, OnBoard connects payment providers to thousands of registries, corporate databases, sanctions and PEP lists, credit bureaus, identity verification services, and adverse media sources in over 200 markets worldwide. This removes the need for multiple point solutions or manual research, allowing you to instantly pull verifiable data from trusted sources to accelerate KYB, AML, and KYC checks, no matter the market or jurisdiction.

OnBoard’s flexible, rules-based decision engines are highly configurable, enabling you to set precise risk thresholds for different business types, geographies, or compliance appetites. This helps limit false positives and enhances onboarding accuracy, even when dealing with the most complex legal entities.

That is why companies like Fiserv, ClearAccept, and Xplor use OnBoard to support efficient, compliant onboarding across multiple markets and business models.

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Case Study: How Nayax Australia Onboarded Over 8,000 Merchants with OnBoard

Nayax Australia, a leading financial services firm, faced mounting complexity as it expanded its merchant base and transitioned into a payment facilitator (PayFac) model. Its legacy systems struggled to keep up with new regulatory requirements, and manual onboarding workflows led to significant delays, frustrated prospects, and resource strain across teams.

Key challenges before OnBoard included:

• Complex onboarding for both new merchants and a fast-growing reseller channel
  

• Manual KYB checks that simply could not scale as volumes increased
  

• Frequent delays and bottlenecks, resulting in lost prospects and high operational overhead
  

• Disparate tools and fragmented processes meant repeated data entry and limited visibility for teams
  
  

To address these issues, Nayax adopted OnBoard as its end-to-end onboarding solution, unifying compliance, sales, legal, and risk workflows in a single platform.

Since adopting OnBoard, Nayax has achieved:

• Onboarded over 8,000 new businesses, thanks to a 98 percent reduction in onboarding time
  

• Built a 100+ reseller channel that can initiate applications independently, freeing up internal resources and accelerating growth
  

• Ensured every onboarding submission meets KYB standards automatically, reducing manual intervention and human error
  

• Enabled a scalable, audit-ready process supporting expansion into new markets and business models
  

• Aligned every department from sales and risk to compliance and operations, with shared visibility and collaboration
  

“We needed an all-in-one solution that could improve our onboarding processes’ efficiency and assist our teams in managing workflows as we grow. We also could not find a solution that could be easily integrated and match our internal requirements like OnBoard. It’s just been phenomenal. OnBoard is now used by nearly every department in our company.” — Dylan Winik, CEO | Nayax Australia

Read the full case study

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Solve KYB Complexity at Scale with OnBoard

KYB onboarding is often seen as a source of friction, frustration, and lost revenue—but it does not have to be. When your teams rely on fragmented processes and manual reviews, every step becomes a potential roadblock, slowing your growth and damaging the customer experience.

MVSI OnBoard is purpose-built to break these bottlenecks. By unifying every stage of onboarding into a single, automated platform, you can transform KYB from a compliance headache into a genuine competitive advantage. Enjoy faster approvals, lower operational costs, and happier customers—no matter how complex your business model or how quickly you are scaling.

Ready to stop losing business to slow onboarding? See how MVSI OnBoard delivers end-to-end KYB automation that empowers your teams, delights your customers, and accelerates your revenue.

 Book your personalised demo with MVSI OnBoard.