Small and medium-sized merchants (SMBs) tend to choose larger payment platforms for their streamlined sign-up experiences, quick approvals and overall convenience, often at the expense of the truly customized, individualized payment experience that smaller, vertical providers offer.
Speed and convenience are consistently two of the most important factors when it comes to payments. That’s why to help even the smallest providers compete, we’d like to introduce NMI Web Forms — a powerful tool designed to enhance onboarding and underwriting and level the playing field.
NMI Web Forms makes it possible to create a fully branded, platform-like sign-up experience without the need for custom coding or backend integrations. This tool takes merchants from their first click on the sign-up button to their final submission quickly and painlessly. It also gets merchant data through underwriting and approval faster and more accurately, cutting the total onboarding time to as little as 10 minutes.
Why Faster Onboarding and Underwriting Are Not Negotiable
In payments, speed and convenience are king. Merchants expect the same fast, frictionless experiences from their business relationships that they enjoy as consumers. That’s why big platforms are so popular, despite their high fees. Merchants can visit their website, sign up and be approved within minutes. That initial convenience is so valuable to them that they’re willing to pay more for it.
To compete against big platforms in an ever-tightening market, smaller players like independent sales organizations (ISOs), payment facilitators (PayFacs) and software platforms need a quick, streamlined sign-up experience.
If you’re a payments company trying to compete and grow, the challenge is figuring out how to create “big-budget” customer experiences and backend workflows without a big budget. That’s where NMI Web Forms come in.
Onboard and Underwrite Faster To Serve Merchants Better
NMI Web Forms makes it easy for ISOs, PayFacs and software providers to offer competitive sign-ups and approval times without a huge development budget or in-house technical expertise. This feature helps smaller payment companies punch above their weight by
- Creating a frictionless merchant sign-up experience
- Cutting onboarding time down to mere minutes
- Accelerating underwriting and approvals with more accurate data
- Eliminating the high costs traditionally associated with developing advanced solutions
Traditional Onboarding Is Slow and Unnecessarily Complex
Onboarding the old way means pulling data from a signed merchant processing application (MPA) and entering each line into the boarding portal of one of your processing partners. These forms potentially have hundreds of fields, so it’s no surprise that manual data migration can easily take 30 minutes or more.
Your operations staff also needs to learn to use each of your processing partners’ unique boarding systems — a significant and time-consuming task.
The Web Forms Solution: Better UX, Straight to the Backend
With NMI Web Forms, the entire onboarding process becomes faster and more efficient for everyone involved. On the front end, merchants can sign up how they want to — online — through a fast, easy-to-navigate, fully branded experience that mirrors what they’ve seen with bigger players.
Once a merchant submits their form, the information is passed directly into your onboarding solution. Whether you’re an ISO or PayFac using Merchant Central or a software platform using NMI Payments, you don’t need to manually move a single piece of data. Instead, all of the fields are perfectly mapped to the selected processor’s requirements and auto-filled on the back end. As a result, the entire onboarding process only takes a matter of minutes.
The Error-Prone Nature of Traditional Onboarding Hurts Approvals and Slows Down Underwriting
Unlike software, human beings aren’t ideally suited for processing large amounts of data because it’s so easy to make mistakes. A single missed field, typo or incorrectly entered number can cause an application to be sent back for revision (or rejected). At best, that means slower time-to-processing. At worst, it means lost business.
Manual onboarding also slows down underwriting, an already slow process to begin with. Whether you’re doing it yourself or handing the due diligence off to a partner, every merchant account needs to be underwritten, and mistakes in the application make it harder for underwriters to verify information, increasing their workload and resulting in a tighter bottleneck.
The Web Forms Solution: Minimized Potential for Human Error and Better Data Validation
By automating the transfer of merchant data from the sign-up form to the back-end onboarding system, NMI Web Forms significantly reduces or even eliminates the need for a human to touch the data at all. That means minimal room for costly human error and, ultimately, faster approvals.
Embedded web forms like these also allow for advanced data validation that old-school forms just can’t offer. With a web form sign-up, a merchant can’t enter data that doesn’t match the expected format. That ensures more accurate information submission right at the source.
Finally, more accurate data means faster underwriting. It also means advanced automated tools like NMI ScanX can be utilized to perform a complete, thorough underwriting process in as little as a few minutes.
Connecting to Processors Was an Expensive Endeavor and a Technical Burden
Merchant service providers have long been familiar with the downsides of traditional sign-up and onboarding processes. Unfortunately, for decades the only real alternative was custom building in-house solutions that offered a better, faster experience for merchants and their internal operations staff. But that required a large in-house development team with deep technical experience; something most companies don’t have.
The lack of interoperability between different processor portals also meant that a unique connection had to be built for each processor, adding to the time, money and overall burden placed on any payments company that wanted to improve their sign-up and onboarding processes.
The Web Forms Solution: Instantaneous, No-Code/Low-Code Insertion Makes Integration a Breeze
NMI Web Forms is a no-code/low-code solution. It can be embedded into your websites or systems by pasting in a snippet of code we provide, so you don’t need to write a single line.
With NMI Web Forms, you can create a fast, streamlined sign-up and onboarding experience that rivals bigger platforms — without dedicating any additional time or in-house technical resources to building a solution yourself. That means happier merchants, faster time-to-processing, more approvals and, ultimately, more revenue — all while you maintain total focus on your core business.
As companies grow, volumes increase and needs change. That’s why we’ve built NMI Web Forms to scale alongside you. And if you ever need a more customized sign-up solution, you can always build your own custom experience using our application program interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs). NMI Web Forms just makes sure you don’t have to do so much heavy lifting in order to compete.
NMI Web Forms Make It Easy to Improve All Areas of Merchant Onboarding
A great sign-up experience and the fastest possible time-to-processing are critical to your ability to compete with the biggest players in the space. NMI Web Forms offers you a turnkey way to create a platform-like experience, with fast, frictionless sign-up and lightning-fast onboarding and underwriting — all while saving you time and money and letting you stay focused on your core operations.
If you’re ready to find out more about how NMI Web Forms can reduce your operational burden and serve your merchants better, reach out to a member of our team today.
Don’t just turn on payments, transform the way you do business
- Generate New Revenue By adding or expanding payment offerings to your solution, you can start earning higher monthly and transaction-based recurring revenue.
- Offer the Power of Choice Allow merchants to choose from 125+ shopping cart integrations and 200+ processor options to streamline their onboarding.
- Seamless White Labeling Make the platform an extension of your brand by adding your logo, colors and customizing your URL.