Manual to Magic: Unlock Merchant Growth with Payments-Centric CRM Automation

What if your merchant onboarding, underwriting, and residuals processes could run automatically?

Manual processes across onboarding, underwriting, and residuals don’t just slow operations — they limit how efficiently you can grow and support your merchants. In this webinar, learn how payments-centric CRM automation streamlines these critical workflows, unlocks new revenue opportunities, and strengthens merchant relationships.

What You Will Learn

• What a payments-centric CRM is — and where traditional CRMs fall short

• How automation drives growth and efficiency by streamlining onboarding, underwriting, and residuals

• How Merchant Central brings it to life — automating workflows to save time and scale your operations

Plus, hear a real-world example of how partners are using automation to scale faster and operate more efficiently.

Transcript

Hello, everybody. We'll just give a couple more minutes for everyone to join, and then we will get started.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us today to learn how payment CRM automation takes manual operations and runs like magic.

I am Carmen Toms, director of customer success here at NMI Merchant Central, and I will be your host today. So we're really excited about getting started. So just a couple of house keeping items, and then we'll we'll jump right in. So a few things. This webinar is being recorded, so it will be sent to you via email in the coming days. So you can if you've forgotten anything, it will be sent, so no worries about that.

We also wanted to mention that we will be at SEAA this upcoming month in June. So please do come see us. We have a booth, so we would love to see you if you are planning to go to that conference.

And finally, if there are any questions throughout the webinar, there is a panel on your right side there that you can ask your questions. So please feel free as there's conversations going on to post the questions, and we'll take some time at the end of the webinar to go through them and so please feel free to do that. We will be getting through them at the end there.

So without further ado, I will I will bring on the other folks who are on this call. So along with me today are Landon and Adam with NMI, and I will hand things over to Landon to kick off introductions.

Thanks, Carmen. Hi, everybody.

My name is Landon Pierce. I'm the well, I'm one of the enterprise account managers for NMI's SaaS division, which includes our CRM Merchant Central, formerly known as IR CRM, as well as our underwriting tool, Scannex, and Monterex.

Adam, I'll pass it to you.

Thank you, Lennon. I'm Adam DiPinto. I'm a lead technical business analyst. I'm part of the partner success team, so I help with the implementations as well as other things.

But, yeah, I'll pass it over to Carmen to do the agenda.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Adam and Landon. Happy to have you both here today.

So today, we'll be talking about the payment CRM, the magic that automation brings to the payments operations. We will be introducing specifically Merchant Central, our product, And then we'll be ending with a partner success story. What does it really look like to use Merchant Central, with a real live customer? And then finally, as noted earlier, we will have a q and a session. So, again, feel free to post questions. We will answering them at the end of our brief session today.

And with that, I will hand things back over to Landon to kick things off.

Thanks, Carmen. So we wanted to start with a quick poll to see what feature is most important to you in a CRM. So give everybody a couple minutes to add their thoughts in there. Click on what's most important to you. I see quite a few people have already started voting. Yeah.

See, yeah, residual report. Oh, reporting. There we go. Big jump.

Very nice.

Okay. Nothing for underwriting or lead. Okay. Lead management's coming in. I do have a Polymarket bet on one of these items, so we'll see which one wins, but so far, it's not looking good for me.

Okay. We're getting pretty even. Pretty even. We'll give it a couple more.

One more.

I I like to see the back and forth.

Yeah. That's kinda interesting. Features.

Excellent. Okay. So maybe we'll oh, okay. There we go. We'll we'll wrap it there. So we have onboarding, processing, taking the lead.

Okay. It's definitely taking the lead. So for anybody that actually voted for that, I'm curious of why you specifically chose that one. So if you wouldn't mind tossing it into the chat, maybe we can look into that as a q and a later and just take some feedback.

But, yeah, that's actually pretty surprising. So, yeah, Landon, do you wanna go ahead and do the introduction for the payment CRM?

Yeah. Absolutely. That that is that is very surprising. I'm glad everybody voted on that. But the great thing about all of those features that you just saw and that you're just voting on is they're already part of Merchant Central most important things to you.

They're already embedded. So what we're looking at here is just kind of a quick wheel of some of the features that we already have available for you. So right now, we're looking at things like merchant pipeline management.

We're looking at your sign up, onboarding, underwriting, reporting analytics, residuals, which is a big topic for a lot of people, and then also business capital, which is I'm not too sure if Lennon has froze or it's just me.

I think it is Lennon freezing.

Okay. All good. No yeah. No worries. No worries. So just like Lennon was mentioning, you can see we have this giant wheel.

And first off, I wanna point out on the left hand side, it says Merchant Central. So you may have heard of us as Iris or MRM, but we're now just Merchant Central. So hopefully that reduces the confusion, when you talk to us later. But, yeah, just like Gladden was mentioning, Merchant Central is a platform that allows you and your team to onboard faster, to underwrite smarter, and to manage everything in one place.

So Merchant Central doesn't just help ISOs or banks, but also helps software providers such as ISVs, and we help by managing every step of your merchant life cycle from contacts to boarding all in one place.

And as you can see with this wheel, we do have multiple areas or multiple components of Merchant Central, and some may not apply to you, which is completely fine. But if you look within those components, we have subcomponents, and that's kind of where the magic of automation happens.

So we look into these areas to see where friction is occurring, and then we apply these steps to help streamline your workflow.

We also have a giant list of processing partners or processor partnerships that we're working with. So as you can see on the reporting side, we have twenty five plus. And then with the boarding, we have about six over there. Again, those are growing much like our feature list, because we do have a great product team that's working hard trying to meet your guys' business needs, trying to improve the platform. And some of those features that we do have can actually earn you money and revenue. And Lennon's back, so I'm gonna pass it over to him to speak about that feature, which is business capital.

Thanks, Adam. It's it's always fun on these things when your network goes down, like, right in the middle of you talking. But I'm I'm back. We could talk about Business Capital, which is a fantastic new tool that we've just added very recently.

This is a very passive low lift, zero lift way for you to actually earn additional income and also provide an additional service to your merchants. So essentially, what it allows you to do is enable this within the CRM and actually send this out to your merchants, and they can select, Hey, yes, I want to take part in this. If they get approved, they'll have a sliding scale of, I want to take this amount or this amount.

Our partner, Paraffin, we did a lot of research looking for the perfect partner, and Paraffin just fit all the lines there. I mean, they hit everything for us. So again, zero lift for you. Our partner, Paraffin, will then take care of everything on the approval, underwriting, the funding, everything for you. And then you actually earn income based off of the loan origination fee. So again, it's a very passive way for you to actually earn income. And what we're finding through our alpha and beta testing is that once a merchant is complete with their payment, they actually come back and take another loan.

And I know, Carmen, you actually had something recently. I'd love for you to share your thoughts on it with one of our partners and their success.

Awesome. Yes. It's it's hard not to get enthusiastic about free money. So thanks for introducing that, Landon.

So handful of you probably already do have lenders. Just putting a little note in for you to think about this as an option. Business capital runs very set and forget. So recently had a customer who did know a little bit about it, but figured why not launch it to our merchants and just see what happens.

And I think about a month, maybe three weeks went by, and we were noticing that they had loaned out for a very high amount, and really only through four months, four loans had already already paid for their Merchant Central licensing for the entire year.

Had to give them a call and ask them what was going on, but for the most part, they said they hadn't really marketed it. They just turned it on. And without saying too much to merchants, it was appealing. It's very easy.

They they don't have to do a ton of underwriting, And so Paraffin does a really good job of of kind of scraping data from the merchants very quickly, and so loans can get approved within the day and funded the next day. So pretty appealing option. Again, a lot of lenders out there, but it it's certainly a set and forget option. So for this specific customer, we're looking forward to actually marketing it to their merchants and seeing what kind of returns they could really even get.

And with that, I'll pass it back to Lynn.

Yeah. I mean, that that is truly an amazing story. And like Carmen said, who doesn't like free money? Right?

I mean, you you can't get you can't get much better than that. Thanks, Carmen, for for going through that. Adam, I wanted to pass it back to you and talk a little bit about the magic with automation and what that really means when it comes down to time saving and everything else. So I'll pass over to you.

Yeah, absolutely. So like I mentioned before, I'm part of the implementation team. So I've worked with several different clients at different stages of their journey. So some clients come to us, and they're still working in paper. They're manually inputting data into CSVs or to different CRMs. And sometimes we just have clients that are just tired of working and signing into different portals just to complete their workflows. So by having everything within Merchant Central, we have it centralized, and we're able to actually go through your workflow to find those areas where we can reduce friction and introduce more automation.

So one of the examples, if you look on the right hand side, we have the residuals income reporting, and there's a drastic, drastic amount of time that has just dropped down there. And if you think about what's happening is we have a client that comes in, maybe they're working with several different partners, and they're exporting that data from their site. So they have to log in, find where to export, take it. It's a CSV. It's unstructured, and then they have to compare that to other CSVs that they've just downloaded. All they wanna do is apply their splits. So when they come over into Merchant Central, we can take that unstructured data, put it into one place, and have it look so that it's organized and ready for them to use and then to apply their splits to their teams so it can just be used on a month to month basis.

This could be a bottleneck for them, and now this frees up a lot of time, and they can start focusing in other areas. So if you go to the very front, so merchant processing application, if you think about it, you have a lead moving through your system, and we can customize statuses and triggers to actually automate internal and external messages. So for an example, maybe a lead reaches a specific stage of your workflow. Maybe this is ready for underwriting or for review.

So what can happen is notifications or emails can automatically go out to their private teams or team members, and you don't have to do that manual follow-up.

We also can do with merchant onboarding and the processing features, Merchant Central offers reporting integrations that automatically pull merchant data from the supported processors that we mentioned previously. And this can be done in defined frequency, so we can do this every day, like, every day on the day, and you get that data coming in. And this just ensures that the data, including MID processing activities, is continuously synced into the system without that manual intervention. So, again, these things may seem like very small things, but once you start adding them together, they compound and then they start reducing time for your team where you can then start focusing on other areas or improving other areas. Now I know we have a couple other examples, and I'll pass it over to Landon to speak to the underwriting aspects.

Thanks, Adam. Yeah, so I know this may not pertain to everybody, but we've actually seen a lot of partners going from non risk bearing to risk bearing over their life cycle. So I wanted to touch on this real quick with some of our other automations when it comes to underwriting and onboarding. So with our Scannex tool, you may have third parties that you're working with, whether it's LexisNexis, Match, TIN, whatever the case might be, and you're having to go to different portals, you have to run different checks and scans, you have to go do all these separate tasks, and they each take individual time to do.

So what our system does is takes all those third parties, combines them into one seamless automation, so that way it's just reaching out to everybody at the same time to run those scans. So what we're seeing is a great reduction in the time that it takes to actually run that scan. It's also giving us a lot more data back into the CRM because once that check is done, we're getting either auto approvals, auto declines. We're getting, hey, we had a few flags get triggered.

We want to go back and review those. Maybe make some edits, rerun that scan so we can get the account approved. So it's making that automation so seamless from data collection to then underwriting to onboarding, which also allows you to gain more merchants and better merchants that fit into your vertical. So it allows you to say, hey, I want to weight these things higher.

I want to weight these things lower. This is not as important to us as this. So it definitely allows you to customize how that scan is being run. And again, it increases the number of merchants that you're able to approve and then onboard.

It also allows you to get rid of those merchants who are on maybe they have PEP sanctions or OFAC. They have issues that you don't want to deal with. It allows you to get rid of them before you can submit them to the processor for the MID. So it allows going right with what Adam was saying, this allows you to automate one step even further if you are doing that risk bearing.

So great tool. Definitely highly recommend reaching out to somebody on our team if this fits your vertical. Definitely reach out and talk to us about this.

And Adam, I'm gonna pass back to you because I know you have a few success stories that you were gonna mention as well, so I'll kick it back over to you.

Yeah, absolutely. So again, being part of the implementation team, I work with multiple clients, and I closed out a project earlier this year where the client wanted to focus on automating their full internal workflow to better manage not just their own merchants, but the merchants of ISOs that they were working with. So previously, many of the parts of their process from lead management to underwriting to compliance checks, this all required manual work, and it was all paper based workflows.

So by moving them into central or Merchant Central, sorry, and introducing these automated processes that we offer, we were able to streamline their lead intake, underwriting submissions, merchant onboarding, and the compliance tracking. So everything now flows through a centralized system where the information is captured once and then automatically routed to the appropriate steps in their in their process. This made a huge impact for their partners that they were working with. It reduced their underwriting turnaround time, reduced their paperwork and manual processing.

So, again, that's how they knew their business. That's how they were operating, and now that's completely gone, and they're just living in the system. It also improved their compliance visibility and then also gave them ability to support more ISOs. So they were at their limits with their old way, but now moving into Merchant Central and being able to automate a lot of these steps, they're able to scale.

They're able to take on five, ten more ISOs. So it's an amazing jump for them, and it's amazing to see how they went from just this paper heavy process, to this digital merchants management workflow. It's been really impressive. So, that's my little my little story for you.

I think I'll pass it over to Carmen so we can jump into the q and a because I believe those are flowing in.

Well, Adam, I saw the twinkle in your eyes there. It was a good story. We always love seeing people move off paper, so it was a genuine enthusiasm Adam had there on that project. I know that. So awesome. Especially seeing a lot of the folks on this call struggling with visibility on the onboarding. I think that's that will really land, so thank you for sharing that.

Well, if you haven't heard it repeated already five times, if you have any more questions, please shoot them in the in the chat over there. We have our first we have our first question coming in right now, so I'll just read it out loud and then Linden or Adam will will snag the question.

So for potential customers that are already using Clover for their payments processing, is there anything more that can be done for them?

Think kind of piggyback on this one. Sure. It's probably a First Data product.

We do have integrations into First Data from the CRM for onboarding and reporting. So there are things there that can be done for them.

If you're talking about maybe during the actual onboarding process of generating, Adam, like a VAR, I think maybe they're talking about a VAR sheet to get for them.

There are certain things I think we can automate. But I'd like to Doug, I'd like to understand this a little bit deeper. So maybe you and I could connect offline with one of our product team members or Adam, somebody on his team, to better understand this and get you the correct answer. I want to make sure we answer it properly.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Lynne. That's super helpful.

K. So the next question.

So I this is a bit about our integration option.

So, of course, it's necessary to know how we integrate with a handful of other products that you may already have in your tech stack. So seeing that the integration with Salesforce is a given, what about other CRM apps like Zoho and One?

Yeah. So I think this comes down to the other CRMs. So I know we offer Zapier integration. So if that is available, we do have Merchant Central Zaps or tasks on Zapier. So you could be passing data over that way. We also do offer open API calls.

So we can set up API calls where you can pull in data from these systems and be able to review them. So hopefully, that answers your question. If not, Jeff, please reach out to us too.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Adam.

Very good. Yes. Lots of integration questions.

We'll see what else is out in the audience here.

Sounds like that does answer the question, so that's great. Nice.

There are some But a couple questions coming in about about Salesforce and so I've got one about Salesforce. I already use Salesforce. Is there a way to integrate Merchant Central automation without replacing my existing system? So kind of on the integration question there.

Yeah. I think or I'll let Landon take this one.

Yeah. Can definitely answer that. So kind of what Adam was just describing previously, we do have several different types of integrations. We have an open API, which allows you to push and pull data on a two way street using REST, JSON.

So you push and pull that data back and forth between another system. But we also do have that Zapier or Zapier, however you want to call it, where you can actually zap back and forth using their middleware. Obviously, the open API is going to be much more robust, but it does take a level of expertise in coding to do that. Whereas Zapier is a much more low code to no code.

And you can just make those if statements. So if this, then that. So hopefully that answers the question. But again, as Adam said, if not, reach out to us.

We'll be happy to dive into it for you.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Leiden. So regarding underwriting, for something that wasn't popular at the beginning, I'm glad to see some underwriting questions.

So regarding underwriting, will this be automated or semi automated in the future?

So Edward, thanks for sending this. I'll be happy to answer this. So it is automated right now. So using the Merchant Central CRM, if you collect a lead data using like our web forms or you're just entering the information, you're getting your documents signed using our eSign, you're automatically able to push that data directly into underwriting and then do all of those different scans for PEP, OFAC, sanctions, TIN, KYC, KYB, everything that you want to run, that can be automated.

And then when that result comes back, it's going to post into the CRM. And on a sliding scale of what you determine, it's going to say this is auto approved, it's auto declined, or, hey, we need some more information. We need another pair of eyes on this. So it is definitely automated right now.

Love to talk to you more about this, how to take some more time offline. We can schedule a full demo and actually show you how it flows from from one to the next for you.

Yeah. And even just like building off that too, if you continue the workflow, so once a scorecard has been approved, you pass that back over to Merchant Central, and, again, we can use a status trigger which could then send that over to the boarding team or another team to review, but then it can go directly into boarding because technically at that point, you already have your information about the merchant. So, yeah, it kinda feels like it is the automated and semi automated look you're you're you're looking for, Edward.

Alright. Back to underwriting. We're gonna stick on this topic for a second. What types of fraud checks do your does your platform support for document verification, detection of manipulated or edited to doc for the fake IDs documents?

Probably, we could probably also give you a bit of a list of what these items are, but, maybe, Adam, if you wanted to chat briefly about what we what we see calmly, maybe that's Yeah.

Absolutely. So I'm just actually pulling up my list right now for fraud. I'm trying to think for IDs and documents. I don't recall if we have a scoring rule specifically for IDs, but I know KYC covers a lot of the documentation verification that you might be looking for within this.

So, again, it depends on the level and degree of what you're looking for with your fraud checks. So Lana did give the list. So, again, TIN check, KYC, KYC, KYC, We have different processing profile rules that we can also introduce, g two Compass, GAIAK, etcetera, and then we can also do credit scores. So, hopefully, a combination of some of those scoring rules would hit what you're looking for with these checks. But, yeah, as for the documentation one, I'd have to take that one away. I'm I'd have to refresh my myself on any of the rules unless, Lennon, you have a role off the top of your head that checks for IDs.

Yeah. I'd have to double check kind of the segment of that to double check that. But again, happy take that offline. We can confirm with you one hundred percent. So if you want to reach out to Adam or myself, we'll be happy to double check that for you.

Yeah. Great question on that.

Thank you so much. There are a couple questions coming in about pricing, so I think that is that is incredibly important.

What we can do is we can pull all of those questions and do a little bit of, q and a on some of those some of those on how your prices.

The high level, it does it does range depending on the mid count that you do have. So we'll probably take some of those offline, and we can send you some some price get someone to give you an idea of what that might be. Alright. So another question here. I'm running a lot of people that use SaaS forms like HoneyBook. How would I be able to work with them as it seems like HoneyBook has locked out of my third party processors? HoneyBook is just the latest, seems to be a theme with a lot of SaaS platforms.

Yeah. And I I I can kind of touch on this because I I work with a lot of partners either adding into an existing platform that they're currently using or completely replacing. So there's different options there. I'm not one hundred percent familiar with HoneyBook.

A lot of SaaS platforms, they do lock down their processors. A lot of them do it these days. That's one of the great things about NMI is Merchant Central. We're very agnostic.

We don't lock you down to one processor or another. We have twenty five different processor integrations, boarding, reporting. We have open APIs. A ton of things available for you.

So we wanna lock you down to one or another.

Now to look at HoneyBook, we'd obviously have to take a look at, do they allow you to API documentation in? Could you take information from our CRM and pop it into theirs? Or can they, you know, can they do it the reverse way back to ours? We'd have to take a look at that. So, Andrew, happy to, you know, take that offline with you. We can look at APIs, get product engineering involved, see what we can do for you.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Landon. Are there any other questions here? Yes. Integration to GHL.

Yeah. I think this kind of touches on the previous integration questions regarding our open API versus Zapier.

With GoHighLevel, I believe there is a Zapier connection there. Don't quote me on that. We'd have to go into their site to double check because they have, I think last time I checked, I think it's twenty five hundred different connections there. We definitely wanna make sure that we we verify that. But there is always our open API with the REST and post features. So we can definitely take a look at that as well, Michael.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Lanin, for asking that last answering that last question, and thanks to everybody in the in the audience for their questions. I think we have time for one more. I think this does relate a little bit to our gateway, but we'll pose it in here. And if we can't get you the full answer for the POS systems that we have, we can follow-up offline on this. Landon or Adam, would either of you like to take the the POS system question, or let me know what you guys think.

I know enough to be dangerous with the gateway.

But for the honestly, to answer this question specifically, I would like to direct you to one of our channel account managers on the gateway team.

They have much more of a pulse on what is going on in terms of the gateway, the offerings, what's coming down the pipe since it is their vertical. So we'll definitely take your question away, and we'll get one of the channel account managers or one of the business development managers to reach out to you. So that way, they can discuss your particular question and make sure we get you the appropriate answer.

Thank you, Lyndon.

That sounds great. Well, thank you everyone for your participation and the eagerness on the Q and A. We'll certainly make sure we get back to you on the questions we were unable to get to.

Thank you so much for joining the webinar. We will be sending out resources to learn a bit more about what we discussed today, so be on the lookout for that. If you do have any additional questions or would like to connect to us, you can reach out to your account manager. So that's either your customer success manager or your channel account manager if you're on the gateway with us, or you can con contact merchant central at n m I dot com. So this information is also posted in the chat. But just wanted to thank you again for joining the webinar on unlocking the magic of a payment CRM, and we hope to see you back in the implementation hot seat with Adam in in the coming months or weeks. Do let us know if you have questions, and have a wonderfu