
Merchant Onboarding + KYC/KYB Automation
Automated merchant onboarding pipeline, KYC/KYB, UBO discovery, sanctions and PEP screening, risk-tiered decisioning with full audit trail. Activation cut from weeks to hours; manual review load down 70%.
What this is, in one paragraph.
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.
Capture, screening, tiering and decisioning share one policy engine. Activation grants capabilities; monitoring feeds back into the same policy, so risk and conversion move together.
The job to be done.
Manual KYC/KYB on regulated merchants was slow, inconsistent and the single biggest blocker to GTV growth, and a compliance risk.
What I shipped.
- 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
How it's put together.
- 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
How it actually runs.
- Risk and product share one queue and one SLA
- Weekly false-positive review feeding back into rules and capture quality
Where I sat in the work.
Product owner end-to-end: defined the risk taxonomy, integrated screening vendors, designed merchant-facing UX and ops tooling.
What moved.
- 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
What I chose against.
- 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
What I'd take into the next build.
- 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.
Relevance to networks, PSPs and cross-border platforms.
The transferable core: making activation speed and risk posture move together, so faster onboarding never weakens the bank, scheme or regulator evidence trail. Acquirers, PSPs and cross-border networks all live or die on that same balance; only the logo changes.
Discussing payment infrastructure / product leadership roles?
Reference-available. Download the résumé or get in touch.
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