Underwrite & Monitor Merchants Directly From Your CRM
October 30, 2022
Imagine if your underwriting and sales teams could seamlessly share data in just a few clicks – transforming back office productivity and significantly enhancing the merchant experience.
Aligning these core functions can revolutionize your business. For underwriters, it’s a huge time-saver that lets them focus their skills on where they’re needed most. Being able to underwrite and monitor merchants directly from your CRM is more efficient, more cost-effective, and more accurate than manually going back and forth between different programs.
It’s also a game-changer for your sales team, giving them the insight and information they need to create more targeted and effective marketing strategies.
This kind of end-to-end integration is a powerful tool that helps Payment Services Providers (PSPs) add value to their business, delivering savings in the short-term while paving the way for future efficiencies as they scale up.
The merchant onboarding process & your CRM
The journey from application to portfolio isn’t always quick or linear. In a typical merchant onboarding process, there are several steps – merchants get their documentation together, complete and submit their merchant application, wait for approval, and only join the portfolio when cleared by underwriters.
When merchants get that green light, their details are onboarded into the PSP’s CRM so that sales can keep track of their activities and provide responsive customer support/service.
The biggest challenge surrounding these workflows is efficiency. Many PSPs rely on manual processes where back office staff painstakingly type out each merchant’s information, inputting it into their CRM line by line. Every time the merchant’s details change, staff have to re-key that information to update their file.
This unnecessary back and forth isn’t just complex and slow. It’s also very frustrating for your merchants who just want to get back to business. Delays in service seriously impact the merchant experience, giving them a negative impression of your business that can do real damage to your brand.
It’s also frustrating for your staff. By forcing them to spend their days shuffling through forms and doing myopic, time-consuming data input, you’re not making the most of your team’s talents. Plus, if they’re overworked and frustrated, they’re more likely to become disengaged and make mistakes. Even the most minor mistake in data entry can cost you business, and the big errors can significantly harm your portfolio and reputation.
If you want to improve both the merchant experience and your staff productivity, your team needs more streamlined tools.
Integrating your CRM with your underwriting tools
Agreement Express’s automated merchant onboarding solutions sync with IRIS CRM so PSPs can run compliance checks and trigger reviews right from their CRM.
How does the integration work?
If a PSP needs to reexamine a merchant’s risk profile or select a merchant for further review, they can do it quickly and efficiently from their CRM in 4 simple steps:
- An IRIS CRM status update submits a merchant to Agreement Express for review
- Agreement Express pulls third-party data to generate a score and report for the merchant
- An underwriting decision is reached and sent to IRIS CRM and the merchant
- Data is made available in IRIS CRM for analysis and further action
Benefits of the Agreement Express & IRIS CRM integration
By teaming up with IRIS CRM, Agreement Express has helped hundreds of payment processors add value to their services, and see measurable benefits to their business.
Why? Because this kind of integration makes sense. Underwriters can use the data that’s already in your CRM to run KYC/AML compliance checks and perform Enhanced Due Diligence, while sales can become more informed about your portfolio, seeing instantly which merchants require extra attention.
Both teams benefit from instant data-sharing and data-driven decision-making. This, in turn, improves a PSP’s risk management in two key ways – by building more accurate risk profiles for merchants and by facilitating more accurate ongoing merchant monitoring.
From reducing risk to improving merchant experience, today’s payments industry is turning to tech to enhance every aspect of business. In this evolving landscape, companies that aren’t taking advantage of the latest developments in fintech aren’t keeping up with their competitors.
Payment processing with automated onboarding, integrated together with your CRM, puts you at the forefront of the industry. Using cutting-edge tools to refine your underwriting and customer service processes won’t just change the way you interact with clients and handle risk, it’ll drive business across the board. Contact the payments experts at Agreement Express to find out more.