Onboarding new merchants is one of the most important tasks your ISO’s team handles on a day-to-day basis. The ability to board merchants both efficiently and effectively ensures that your ISO can grow quickly without worrying about bottlenecks or breakdowns in the process. But that’s easier said than done because boarding in the traditional way is a highly involved process rife with the potential for errors, wasted time, and wasted resources. Luckily, there are ways to streamline and enhance the boarding process to improve its speed, accuracy, and continuity. 

 

Speed Up Onboarding to Reclaim Lost Time and Resources

Boarding is a slow process that can take even experienced employees 20 to 30 minutes or possibly more depending on the account. That eats up an enormous amount of time, especially for smaller ISOs that don’t have dedicated boarding departments. Time is money, so anything you can do to speed up your boarding and save valuable time (and the associated salaries) is a worthwhile pursuit. 

Boarding faster also means your merchants start earning faster. That helps juice up your residuals and makes a great first impression with your new clients, who are likely as or more eager than you to get revenue flowing. 

One of the best ways to speed up the boarding process is to begin using digital MPAs instead of traditional paper forms. Not only does that eliminate the need for you and your new merchants to print or scan anything, it eliminates the need for your team to manually transfer the data from the MPAs into the boarding portal of whichever processor you’re uploading them to. 

 

Make Onboarding More Accurate to Minimize Delays and Rejections

New merchants represent a risk, which means a lot of information is required to ensure that risk is properly mitigated prior to acceptance. Whether your ISO is handling the underwriting yourself or passing on merchants to be underwritten by your processing partners, ensuring the enormous amount of data contained in an MPA is transferred over to the relevant systems accurately is crucial. 

A single errant keystroke has the potential to cause an application to be sent back for more supporting documentation or denied outright. Errors in rate or split entry also have the potential to completely undercut your profits. Simply put, errors can’t happen, but how do you eliminate them when human beings are involved in the process?

The key is to minimize the amount of human interaction with the data in order to minimize the potential for human error to undermine your success. The best way to do that is by engaging automated boarding software, like IRIS CRM’s TurboApp, that can pull the relevant customer data directly from a digital MPA and automatically transfer it into the boarding portal. That leaves minimal manual entry to be done by your staff, who mostly only need to review the uploaded data, add any supporting documentation, and fire the application off to the processor. 

 

Keep a Close Eye on Status to Ensure the Onboarding Process Keeps Moving

The boarding process doesn’t officially end until a merchant has been accepted. It means that even once an application has been completed and sent off, there may still be work left to do. The processor may request additional supporting documentation to aid in the underwriting process, and any delays in submitting that documentation are delays in getting that merchant’s business up and running and, in turn, in your residuals. The processor may also reject the merchant outright, in which case you’ll need to begin a new application with another one of your processing partners as quickly as possible. 

In both cases, the key to minimizing delays is to stay on top of the process at all times. That’s easy to do for one or two applications, but when your ISO has dozens of applications in process at any given time, it can be easy for updates to slip through the cracks. The best way to avoid that is to ensure your boarding software offers automatic update notifications and an easy way to manually go in and check the status of each in-process and completed application. 

 

Revolutionize Your Onboarding with TurboApp

TurboApp is IRIS CRM’s proprietary boarding software and has been designed specifically to minimize or eliminate every major problem with the traditional boarding process. TurboApp uses digital MPAs to pull data directly into a customized boarding portal that pre-configures itself to perfectly integrate with the boarding system of whichever payment partner you select. It reduces the boarding process from 20 minutes or more to five minutes or less, even for inexperienced members of your team. It also automates most of the data transfer, significantly reducing the chances of errors sinking an application or hurting your profits. Finally, TubroApp offers an easy-to-use reporting dashboard that allows you to maintain complete situational awareness on each and every one of your applications, both open and closed. 

If you’re ready to check out Turbo App and see all its advanced features in action, schedule your guided demonstration now and let a member of the IRIS team show you everything it can do to supercharge your boarding process.