How You Manage Data Could Be Holding Back Your Merchant Acquiring Business

Growing a merchant acquiring business is top priority for leaders in product, operations, and compliance roles. Faced by the common challenge of providing effective customer experience, during heavily regulated times requires teams to work together in order to understand how customer data affects each part of the business. Frequently, a merchant acquiring organization is exposed to risks through the continued use of legacy systems and traditional databases, which commonly add friction to each stage of the acquiring process.

This post discusses three ways these teams can come together to streamline customer onboarding, improve the compliance process, and manage data better in the process.

1. Work backwards to improve your onboarding process

With the rise of slick account opening experiences, came a big push for merchant acquirers to improve their own boarding process. Many start right from the beginning, tackling paper forms and digital signatures in an attempt to remove friction and improve customer experience. The reality is that slick forms look great, but don’t solve workflow and data management issues. To understand what bogs down your onboarding process, the product team should work with compliance and operations to examine all of the data collected from merchants upon sign up. How much of that is critical to the onboarding process, and how much of that information can be collected later on? The examination of process should start backwards, first examining the risk and compliance requirements. This first step is critical to understanding how much customer data your organization collects and how the data is mapped across the organization.

2. Create a scalable data management environment

When your organization updates onboarding forms and compliance process, heavy lifting is required from IT when re-programming your traditional database. As your KYC requirements grow or shrink, so must the way your data is mapped in the database. Keeping compliance systems up to date can be a slow process if IT experts are required to manually make changes to the database. Legacy systems and traditional databases contribute to inefficiencies when information is requested on multiple occasions. Think about how frequently you re-use or re-call customer data for any purpose (like reporting or onboarding into new products). Chances are, your organization undertakes one or all of those actions several times a day, and a traditional database, coupled with a legacy system is slowing this process down more than you may realize.

This brings with it the opportunity for cross-departmental collaboration. Such activity might include the creation of a histogram of client distribution that provides a focus for product development on lucrative segments. For example via a visual representation that displays merchant distribution alongside acquirer risk profile.

1. Work backwards to improve your onboarding process

2. Create a scalable data management environment

3. Make informed decisions based on customer data

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