Turning Time Into Growth with Payment Workflow Automation

What would your business do with an extra 100 hours every month?

Manual payment operations create bottlenecks that slow growth, drain resources and frustrate merchants. In this webinar, learn how payment organizations are cutting manual processing time, accelerating merchant onboarding and retaining more merchants — without adding complexity. 

 What You Will Learn

• How automation directly reduces time-to-board and operational cost
• How leading organizations decrease manual work and operational friction
• How faster onboarding translates to higher merchant activation and retention
• The connection between automation, retention and scalable growth
• What modern payment operations look like in practice

Don’t let manual processes limit your growth potential. 

Transcript

Well good afternoon everyone and welcome to our fireside webinar series.

Today we'll be talking about the benefits of automating your payment workflows and specifically how automation drives efficiency, time savings, and growth. My name is Carmen Tombs. I'm the director of customer success here at NMI Merchant Central.

So first, just a couple housekeeping notes. This webinar is being recorded and will be sent to you in the coming days, so you're welcome to take a look at it later if you miss pieces of it.

Also, we will be attending MWAA in Chicago July twenty second and twenty third. We do have a booth, so please come and see us. We'll have a handful of representatives there. We would love to see you.

Another item, this is actually our second webinar of the Fireside Bingo series. If you attend all three webinars and stay until the end, you will be automatically entered into a chance to win a two hundred dollar gift card, so please stay until the end.

And another item you'll see in your panel on the right hand side, there's a Q and A tab, So anytime throughout the webinar, please drop your questions into the Q and A tab, and we will reserve time at the end of the webinar to answer those questions. If we don't get to all of them, we will certainly get to you offline after the webinar is all done. Anything that comes to mind as our panelists are speaking, you can throw it in there.

So on this lovely Wednesday, I'm joined by my colleagues Adam and Neil from the Merchant Central team, and I will let them introduce themselves.

Thanks, Carmen. I'm Adam DiPinto. I'm a lead technical business analyst here at NMI. I work with our partner success team, and I focus on implementations within Merchant Central.

Hi, everybody. My name is Neil Zolasnack. I'm a solutions engineer here at NMI focused specifically on Merchant Central, the payment c CRM product. I joined n m NMI in twenty twenty two through the acquisition of Iris CRM, and I live in Brooklyn, New York.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Neil and Adam. It's a pleasure to be here with both of you today. We've worked together for a while with Merchant Central, so we are in good hands with this crew.

So before we dive into all the details, we wanted to kick something off with a bit of an interactive poll. So I want you to think about this one. What would you do with an extra hundred hours a month?

The poll is gonna pop up for you.

So would you support your team, spend more time supporting them? Would you spend more time supporting your merchants?

Would you spend a bit more time on sales and business development, or would you take some work life balance and use the hours for yourself?

There we go. Okay.

I I was surprised that it was actually just sitting on supporting my team, then, work life balance started started increasing. That's good to see.

What do you think? Adam, what would you do with the extra time?

I'm gonna follow everybody else right now. I'm going to work life balance. I think, having a couple more hours in my month to maybe pick up a new skill. I've been thinking about sailing even though I'm not your water. I think that'd be a solid skill to have just in case. What about yourself, Neil?

For me, yeah, same thing. You know, work life balance, I'd like to just get outside more and, maybe take some tennis lessons.

Used to play when I was younger and something that's gotten away from me, so I'd to pick that back up.

Well, are great options. I think a lot of us would love to do as much as we could in our job while still getting to go outside. So hopefully, the end of this webinar, we'll be able to see how you can get some time back and turn it turn it into growth through automation.

And with that, I will pass things over to Neil, who's gonna be jumping right into Yep.

So, yeah, if you're joining us today, you're already familiar with the key payment workflows that take up massive amounts of time when they're done manually. Those are merchant sign up, merchant underwriting, boarding, and residuals calculations.

Not only do these operations take time, but they leave room for human error, which can result in unhappy agents and merchants, so much so that they may go elsewhere.

Everything changes when you automate these workflows, and Merchant Central is built to do just that.

So with that, we have another poll.

We wanna understand where you guys are with your journey of automation.

Are you just starting out with automation? Are you maybe a beginner with a few things digitized?

Are you advanced, or are you an expert with all of your different workflows fully automated and talking to each other?

Nice, okay, we're getting some just starting and beginners, that's good to see you're at the right place if you wanted to learn about some automation, specifically within Merchant Central. So we got one expert coming in too. So that's very nice too. So hopefully maybe they can teach us something in the questions if anything's wrong to them. But that's looking like a solid basis.

Yeah. Beautiful. Okay. We can hop right in. So just like, Neil was mentioning, we do have our payment workflows and we separate those into different categories. And within those categories, we've actually broken them down into different phases.

So starting off, we have your merchant sign up. And for phase one, what we've considered is your paper and manual entry phase. So long ago, and honestly, for some organizations still today, merchant sign up meant handing someone a physical application. But the merchant fills it out, hands it back to you, and then someone on your team manually keys in every field into your system.

So that's your name, address, business type, bank information, all of it, all of it's done by hand. So the problems are pretty obvious in hindsight. You can deal with terrible handwriting, missing fields, transposed numbers, and it's awful. So every error means you're going back to your merchants, which means delays, which means frustration on both sides, and your agents are just burning time.

Your merchants are waiting and nobody has visibility into the application and where it stands.

So for the next phase, we digitize, but it's still manual at heart. So we have the digital form, and it felt like progress, and it was.

Paper went out, merchants could fill things online, and there's the thing, you can digitize the form, didn't digitize the workflow though.

Someone still had to open that submission, review it, and then email to the next person on the chain, maybe that's underwriting, maybe that's compliance, maybe it's a manager who just needs to sign off. So you're essentially passing a digital file around the same way you used to pass paper, this time it's just faster.

And because of this, it still relies on people remembering to act, to follow-up, and manually move things forward. So the bottlenecks didn't disappear, they just moved into your inbox, which is not great.

But for phase three, what we considered is your automated workflow, and this is kind of the payoff. So this is where things actually change. So picture this, a merchant submits their application. The moment the form is completed, Merchant Center just goes to work.

The pipeline status updates automatically, the right team member gets assigned and notified, no one has to figure out whose digital desk it lands on, and a confirmation goes out to the merchant so they immediately know their application was received and it's moving forward.

If a ticket or help desk ticket needs to be created, done.

So nothing sits, nothing gets lost in the email thread, and nobody has to remember to follow-up because the system just does the work for you.

Now, part of what makes this possible is what's happening under the hood with the data itself within Merchant Central. Merchant Central takes that unstructured inconsistent signup data and gives it a standard and a structured format from the moment it's collected. So we have field validation in place to make sure that the right data and the right type of data is being captured every time.

And now because the data is structured, it can be mapped across multiple features automatically within the platform. So no having to rekey anything or copy and paste between teams. It only has to be entered once and there's no loss, sorry, there's no risk of making mistakes and nothing falls through the cracks, and it's simply easier to manage from end to end.

So here's also the piece that surprises people too, because every step of your life cycle is being tracked automatically now, you're reporting changes. So instead of someone manually pulling data at the end of the month to figure out where the applications are stalling, those reports from themselves. You get real visibility into the pipeline where things are moving fast, where things are slowing down, and you can actually act on them now. So for your agents, it means less chasing and more selling, and for your ops team, it means fewer fires, and for leadership, it means a pipeline that you can actually trust. So moving along within the cycle, we have your underwriting stage.

So for phase one, you have the manual review from the ground up again. So underwriting, it carries risks, and it carries real stakes. So you could approve the wrong merchants and you're on the hook for risk. You can decline too many and you're leaving revenue on the table. So in phase one, every one of those decisions was made by hand. An underwriter would receive an application, pull reports manually from multiple platforms separately, one at a time, logging into those different systems, then interpreting the results, documenting the findings, and then making a judgment call. So it's skilled work, but it's also slow and inconsistent and entirely dependent on whomever happened to be reviewing that file.

So with phase two of underwriting, we've now gone to digital inputs, but it's still manual decisions.

So we have our digital application and some online verification tools into the mix, and that helps, but underwriter still has to be the one orchestrating everything, knowing which checks to run, when to run them, and how to wait conflicting signals from different sources.

So the process got a little bit faster, but it didn't get more consistent. You could have two underwriters looking at the same application and reach different conclusions. So because of this, the scoring was still in their head and not in the system. So if we hop over to our phase three of underwriting, this is where you actually have automated scoring and more human judgment where it matters.

So this is what it would look like in practice. When an application comes in, Merchant Central automatically runs it through a scorecard with a set of scoring rules. So this is simultaneously pulling from different processors that you might have relationships with. So that could be G2, Experian or TransUnion, KYC, TinCheck.

It can be whatever combination of those rules you like to put together, again, just based on your relationships with those processors. So the scorecard builds itself in the background and nobody is waiting, nobody's logging into different platforms anymore, and nobody's having to check conflicting data. So let's go into some of those scoring rules because this is where things also get interesting. So that KYC piece isn't just a checkbox anymore, it's actually leaning on AI now. So some of the scoring rules use AI powered merchant data validation to actually cross reference application details.

So you have your business name, address, phone number, identities, and this is all going against authoritative sources like secretary of state, your business registration, Google maps, social media, whatever it may be. So you're not just collecting the data anymore, you're actually validating that that business is who it says it is, and this is happening automatically.

Another example of an AI driven tool is our MCC auto decision rule. So this rule automatically recommends most likely merchant category code and gives you a confidence score, assigned to it. So it may sound like a small detail, but it actually matters. You're moving merchants out of a generic catchall MCC category and into an accurate one, which improves your portfolio visibility and strengthens your risk management down the line. So that was some of the rules, but now with the scorecard and it being completed, the system knows what to do next. So applications that fall within your approval range, they can move forward automatically. Ones that fall clearly outside can get declined without having to actually deliver that news manually anymore.

But however, the ones that need a closer look, that borderline case, they can get flagged and routed to your underwriter with everything they need in front of them to start making a decision. So your underwriter isn't just a data clerk anymore, they're actually a decision maker. They're spending their time on the applications that actually need human judgment, not the ones that the system can just handle themselves.

And because that entire scoring process is all documented automatically, You have your audit trail, which is now clean. Your decision is defensible, and your risk exposure is visible in real time and not after the fact. So at this point, a merchant has signed up, they've been underwritten, so all the hard work of qualifying them is now done. They're not live yet. So getting them to that approved stage, the boarded stage, and actually processing payments, this is its own critical step, and I'll actually pass it over to Neil to take this.

Thank you, Adam.

Slide. Slide here. Right.

So boarding merchants. That requires you or your agents to submit all of the business information, owner details, merchant pricing, signed MPA document, a voided check, any other supporting documents through a processor's boarding platform, all of the things that you've gathered during your discovery in that merchant sign up process that Adam just discussed.

And now that we've got an underwritten merchant, assuming you guys are doing underwriting, you are now ready to board a merchant. So traditionally, you would have to take all that information, and it's a very manual process. You can have human error that will cause pended applications, delay your merchant's time to first batch.

That's gonna frustrate you, it's gonna frustrate your agents, and it's gonna frustrate your merchants.

So phase one of boarding. Right? Phase one of the automation of boarding. You're compiling all this different information from separate systems and manually rekeying everything into a boarding platform. The data is scattered, and valuable time is wasted while your merchant is ready to start processing today.

So phase two, now you have everything in a centralized CRM platform that is syncing the conversations, emails, texts, agent notes, anything else along with supporting documentation so that your boarding agent can find everything in one place.

Agents do still need to manually rekey everything into that processor's boarding platform. So as you can see, you know, we've made some progress here. We've got everything in one place. We're not having to go dig everything from different text messages, emails, phone calls, all kinds of notes, handwritten notes, hopefully not. But now phase three.

You're using a CRM that's built for payments.

It's giving you tools to expedite this whole process, such as pricing templates, statement analysis, digitized, esigned NPAs, and you can ship the data directly to the processor without rekeying anything.

So if you're boarding one of our integrated processors, you can do exactly that.

Additionally, if you're boarding a TSYS or Fiserv, we also have that auto board tool that will allow you to automatically trigger this process if the underwriting checks that Adam described are met. So let's say anything over a score of ninety you guys want to auto approve, you can set that up so that this boarding process kicks off automatically without any human intervention at all.

So you can see here on the slide some of the time savings that that could look like. But now that your merchants are actually processing, it's time to pay your agents. Right?

So let's take a look at residuals.

As you guys already know, every ISO most ISOs work with multiple and each processor delivers a uniquely formatted residual file that you have to pay your agents with or anyone that's downstream. So maybe it's a referral partner, whoever.

So phase one of automation.

That's you or your residual specialists compiling each Excel file that you get at the end of the month and determining which agents should be paid on which MID, correctly assigning their split and making any buy rate adjustments.

Doing this manually in spreadsheets can take days, and of course, it's very prone to error.

Miscalculated residuals will damage the agent relationship, of course. And if it happens frequently enough, they'll likely go elsewhere.

Story we all know too well.

Phase two of automation, you've built out a system that can help with the calculations each month, but it doesn't deliver a transparent reporting to your downstreams, and it requires a lot of upkeep.

Now phase three.

With Merchant Central, splits are assigned when merchants are boarded.

Buy rate adjustments happen automatically, and all of your different processor files are centralized and presented in a single format to you and to your downstreams.

Residual calculations go from taking hours or days to just a few minutes.

Once you've reviewed everything, you can publish the reports and your agents can log in to their portal and review their residual calculations for each merchant. Ultimately, you arrive at the number faster so you can pay out fast and with confidence.

Alright. And now I'm gonna kick it back over to Adam here.

Beautiful. So, hopefully, you kinda have a clear understanding of the benefits and outcomes of automation that Merchant Central can provide. The platform allows for, again, faster onboarding, so that's your merchant sign up, underwriting approvals, and boarding process. This allows for more accurate and quicker residuals, so again, allowing for payouts and proper splits. And this efficiency and accuracy also allows for hours and hours of time saved, which in turn means more time to focus on your business growth, reduced operational costs, stronger merchant relationships and retention, or just more time to sit around and sip a Mai Tai in Hawaii, it's your call. So, with that, we have one last poll and this is based on the information shared today, your perception changed of where you are in your automation journey?

Let's see if we can have that poll up.

To be honest with you, Adam. I think you taught me a couple of things here that I might not have known before.

Well, thank you, Neil. I also learned some things from you today too. So I hope it was good. We got one coming in.

So yes, this seems to help them a bit. So we'll take that. Thank you very much. I'm gonna pass it over to Carmen now.

Or sorry, actually, I'm gonna pass it over to Neil.

Yeah. So the Merchant Central payment CRM is a complete platform that seamlessly integrates to run automation capabilities that you need designed around your workflows.

You can implement Merchant Central as an all in one replacement solution or take a more modular approach.

So at NMI, we always strive to provide you with modularity, flexibility, and choice when it comes to our products and solutions.

That means if you need just the residuals tool, no problem. If you just want underwriting for now, that's great. We can definitely do that for you. So you can integrate what you need and add on as you scale.

Plus with Merchant Central, you can also enable automated embedded lending with business capital shown there on that wheel graphic there on the left side. This tool gives your merchants access to working capital loans inside of your platform, which they're already using. So our partners earn a commission on every funded loan and unlock a new passive revenue stream with just a few clicks.

The offers are based on the merchant sales history with no credit checks, and the merchants receive funding within one to two business days. It's transparent upfront pricing, which means that the merchant sees exactly how much the loan is gonna cost them with no compounding interest or confusing terms.

If you do want more information on business capital, please reach out to your account manager. Happy to get you connected to some more information and show you how to get that get started with that.

Alright. So let's actually welcome Carmen back to the stage, and we can run through some q and a.

Wonderful. Thanks so much, Neil, and lovely to see the chat getting all fired up. Yes. Business Capital is one of the newer additions that we have made to the Merchant Central platform and are really excited to give you the tools to help your merchants do things that they would be typically doing anyway, with the lending piece, and it's pretty easy for you to set up and easily to easy to get paid out on that. So do reach out to your CSM or your CAM to learn more about that. It's very, very cool and very easy tool.

So with that, if you haven't typed your question yet, feel free to throw it into the q and a. And what we're gonna do is start with first question, and here it is. So are the reports from Merchant Central fairly static, or can they can be configured to whatever parameters an ISO may desire?

Yeah. I can oh, yeah. Oh, we're both eager for this one. I'll I'll just go ahead.

And you can add in if there's anything I'm missing with it too. So, that's a great question. They are flexible, in a way that will allow you to actually do what we call advanced reporting. So as long as the data is within the system of Merchant Central, you can start building out reports specifically around that.

We do have static reports about your lead, your underwriting, web forms, applications, and everything going through. So those are are more consistent or static ones that you would have there. But, yes, they are configurable to actually create new new ones that better suit your needs just as long as the data is within the system. Did I cover it, Neil?

Yeah. That sounds great. Absolutely. Nice.

Wonderful. Thanks, Adam. This is not another one's coming in here. So for any MIDS boarded outside of NMI as the processor, is there a concern for solicitation for a migration?

I wouldn't say concern. We do have migration tools that would allow us to migrate merchant data and lead data into the system.

It is a bit of a process as everybody is is aware. So if there was a big migration that would need to take place, we can definitely have a conversation about that to see what your dataset is looking like and the size of it.

But from what I know, migrations are they occur all the time with the notes.

That's a great answer. Thank you, Adam.

I know I know who's gonna jump on this one. Is Elavon coming down the road for a boarding integration?

Yeah. It's in the it's in the works for sure. It's definitely definitely a bit in the works. So I think it's in the final stages as as far as I heard last most recently.

I think, you know, we're just kind of working product is working on on getting that wrapped up and and shipped and tested. So definitely coming soon.

Thank you, Neil.

We may have time for a couple more questions, so feel free to drop them in there. Can we load our own merchant account, payment gateway, business funding, or other vendor through the application onboarding and residual reporting process?

Think I would need more detail about this. So again, going back to, like, merchant accounts, yes, we would be able to migrate those or import them into the system. That's for payment gateway and your business funding. I'd have to I'd have to get a better understanding of that to see how we would approach that. So we may have to collect some more information from you, Jay, if that's okay.

Yeah. And we can maybe do a follow-up on that too to get more details. Thank you, Jay.

Another good question. How do you minimize fraudulent applications on the front end?

Would this specifically be about Daigos, about bad data coming into the system? So if so, we do offer an application such as our web forms to collect merchant data or lead data, and we would apply validation to those specific fields. So let's say you're collecting social insurance, this would be a secure field, that only your sales managers will be able to view. Let's say date of birth, again, we have date widgets to allow to collect the proper format, email validation as well.

I'm just trying to think what other validations that we do have on the front end. And then moving over to the underwriting side, all of the scoring rules, there's a bunch of them, but the few that I mentioned, that's where your fraudulent behavior is going to be picked up as well, right? So if someone did provide you with a bad business name or an incorrect address, one of those scoring rules, such as like KYC or KYB would actually provide you with more information saying that, no, this is not accurate. This has been graded lower.

You should look into this and follow-up to make sure that there isn't any fraudulent behavior.

Hopefully that answers your question on both sides.

Thank you, Adam, for for answering those questions, and thank you audience for the participation today. That was wonderful. I did see a couple questions about pricing and subscription models, so we will be doing some follow-up directly with those individuals at a very high level.

It does depend on the size of your portfolio. So we do have some some opportunities for contracts in the lower mid range, and we've also got customers in the thousands and of mids and merchants. So it certainly is a bit of a scale, but we will follow-up for that, for those individuals. Now do make sure to check out the Merchant Central time savings calculator.

Grab the link now if you can, and then you can put in some of your own firm's data there and explore a little bit further where Merchant Central can save you time. I do think that you probably get an idea by now of the tedious activities you might be doing that you'd like to get rid of. So the calculator might give you some objective numbers, which is a really great tool, especially if you're looking to sell anybody on it, and get approval. So please pull that out.

And as we said, there there is a bingo series going on, so please register for an fireside webinar. Our favorite word these days, the AI powered pricing. So we do have we do have kind of a new and exciting tool that we will be introducing to the suite about pricing optimization, and that's through our through our acquisition of fee navigator. So the link to register is in the chat, so please join us next time.

We would absolutely love it. And we hope you enjoyed your time, and we look forward to seeing you at our next webinar.

Excellent. Thank you.