One of the biggest challenges for National Processing, a nationally regarded merchant services company, was ensuring that the organization could scale their growth effectively and efficiently. While they were confident in their underwriting decisions, it simply took the team too long to get to the needed level of confidence.  Wayne Hamilton, founder and CEO of National Processing, was looking to position the company as one of the top merchant service providers.

He knew that meant adapting to a more “Amazon-like” experience without sacrificing confidence for speed. “We’ve seen some trends in the merchant service industry where automation’s a big deal. The major players have become fully-automated in their underwriting. That is starting to be a standard for all merchant services.”

Here are 4 more CEO insights — and why they matter:

1. Seeking automation but never compromising on confidence: “We were looking for a solution like Agreement Express to become as automated as possible and save our human capital for those times where it really takes somebody to look into it,” explains Hamilton. “But one of the things that we were not willing to compromise on is our confidence level to decide whether we approve or decline the account. Agreement Express has been able to drastically reduce decisioning time with the same confidence level.”
2. Scaling and growing with speed to implementation: “We had a huge growth spurt with National Processing,” says Hamilton. “We were in a hurry to be able to get the software in place as quickly as possible. The Agreement Express team was able to get us live in 13 days and we fully adopted the solution and our new, improved process in 30 days.”
3. Achieving 70-80% auto-decisioning:  “We were looking for a high percentage of auto-decisioning to have an instantaneous approval or decline,” says Hamilton. “Before Agreement Express, we averaged about 90 minutes to get to a decision. Now, it’s under 30 minutes, which is a huge increase in our productivity. Automation with Agreement Express gets work out of the hands of the underwriters and enables them to go back and dig into bigger accounts and accounts that need more attention. Now, National Processing can’t live without that ability.”
4. Saving time with our sponsor bank: “But really, the winning story for us is the adoption that our sponsor bank took and being able to accept our scorecard in Agreement Express instead of sending them an old fashioned email,” says Hamilton. “Now, they can have logins and get us approvals throughout the day, which saves us four or five hours in our turnaround for underwriting.”

Lastly, Hamilton emphasizes, “Agreement Express has really helped us to get decisions back to our merchants quickly and give them the experience that we’re looking to give from National Processing. We’re excited for the next five years.”