Agreement Express COO On One-Click Rule For Onboarding Merchants

Numbers can be everything when it comes to any competitive landscape. That’s especially true when it comes to the competition for merchants in the battle to onboard them.

The numbers? Well, providers want merchants in their rosters. More customers mean top-line growth, and better, streamlined processes mean stickier relationships — if independent sales organizations (ISOs), independent software vendors (ISVs) and merchant service providers (MSPs) get the dynamics of the relationships right. But it’s hard to keep those relationships in place if the onboarding process is a tough one, marred by forms, redundant data entry and link after link that must be clicked.

Consider the following numbers: A 42 percent conversion rate, a one-click process and 10 minutes or less to complete the application. Those are no mere throwaway figures. As noted by Agreement Express’ COO Cory Taylor, the timing and process can be done with ease for merchants in mind, which means that all stakeholders benefit.

However, moving to the one-click approach has a lot of moving parts that may seem like a bit of a minefield, especially as acronyms such as Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) come to bear. Taylor offers some insight into how firms should shift their thinking in smoothing the merchant’s journey to their respective markets.

In merchant acquisition, firms are competing with digitally focused resellers (especially ISVs) — including, for example, Shopify — that can have several offerings across one platform.

“At this point, a one-click approval should not catch anybody by surprise,” Taylor told PYMNTS. “The newer industry players that are 100 percent digitally focused have been around long enough so that everybody should know about this. The question is what are merchant acquiring companies doing [proactively] about it? The ability to survive in this industry is questionable if they do not move to this technology.”