Merchant Onboarding + KYC/KYB Automation

Re-architected merchant activation as a single risk + product surface: capture, screening, tiering, pricing and ops review all driven by one configurable engine instead of seven manual workflows.

Manual KYC/KYB on regulated merchants was slow, inconsistent and the single biggest blocker to GTV growth, and a compliance risk.

• Document capture, OCR and liveness verification flow
• Risk-tiered KYB pipeline with sanctions, PEP and adverse media screening
• Automated UBO discovery and corporate structure validation
• Configurable rules engine for jurisdiction-specific requirements
• Operations console with prioritized review queues and SLA tracking

• Capture, screening and decisioning split into independent services with one shared case object
• Policy-as-config, jurisdiction rules versioned and audited per merchant decision
• Decision explanations rendered to ops, merchant and regulator from the same source

• Risk and product share one queue and one SLA
• Weekly false-positive review feeding back into rules and capture quality

Product owner end-to-end: defined the risk taxonomy, integrated screening vendors, designed merchant-facing UX and ops tooling.

• Reduced merchant activation from weeks to hours for low-risk tiers
• Cut manual review workload by ~70% with no increase in default rate
• Standardized onboarding across UAE, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Iraq and Egypt

• Invested in capture quality before any policy automation, slower start, lower long-term review load
• Forced a single global schema with jurisdiction overlays rather than per-country forms

• Onboarding conversion and risk are the same product surface, separating them creates leakage and false positives.
• Most KYB delays are document quality issues, not policy issues. Fix capture first.

Acquirers, PSPs and cross-border networks live or die on activation funnel and risk posture. This is the playbook the Visa/Stripe/Adyen onboarding orgs operate from.