Valmar Merchant Services Increased Onboarding Speed by 8x with Agreement Express

Wowing their merchants is a core value for payment processor Valmar Merchant Services. Laser-focused on their client’s needs, the market-leading firm teamed up with Agreement Express to update its merchant onboarding process and is now looking ahead to a bright future.

Take a look at our recent video interview with Brian Fehr, Compliance Officer at Valmar!

 

The Challenge: Manual Bottlenecks in A Competitive Market

 

As more and more people do business online, the payments industry is seeing rapid growth and becoming more competitive as a result. Already a strong player in the market, Valmar looked to set themselves apart from the competition by leaning into their strengths, doubling down on their commitment to enhance the merchant experience. The company also knew that it needed to adopt more innovative practices in payment optimization, compliance, and fraud management to meet the demands of the growing market and lay the groundwork for future success.

Valmar had a robust process in place for their current business operations, however they soon realized that it lacked scalability, which can impact the merchant experience. Clients come first at Valmar, and providing an exceptionable merchant experience is non-negotiable. To overcome these hurdles, Valmar moved quickly to identify and resolve the issue.

“We had established a robust underwriting program but although it was thorough, it was laughably slow. We always aim to provide our merchants with the very best customer experience, and the manual onboarding process and slow merchant underwriting was definitely missing that mark,” says Compliance Officer Brian Fehr.

Unable to keep up with their growing portfolio, and mindful of their merchants, Valmar turned to Agreement Express’ fully automated underwriting and onboarding solution. They realized that embracing automation was the key, and their forward-thinking paid off.

 

The Solution: Making The Move to an Automated Underwriting System

 

Valmar provides clients with transparent payment processing solutions, offering the full range of merchant services so clients don’t have to shop around but can access everything they need from a single, trusted provider.

Fehr explains: “Valmar is creating a payment processing ecosystem for our merchants, which has been really successful for our bottom line. Instead of a merchant having to go to A, B, C and D for all their solutions, they can just go to just V for Valmar and that is going to be a merchants one-stop shop for their payment processing needs.”

Partnering with Agreement Express, Valmar was able to quickly and efficiently automate their onboarding and underwriting processes so they could provide the exceptional ‘one stop shop’ services their merchants needed. The Agreement Express team was quick to deploy their software, giving Valmar solutions they could roll out almost immediately so they and their merchants didn’t miss a beat.

 

The Results: Automated Processes That Wow Merchants & Staff

 

What previously took days is now completed in a matter of minutes. Using Agreement Express’ merchant account solutions, Valmar significantly cut its turnaround times – getting merchants approved 8 times faster, with the ability to underwrite a package in as little as 15 to 30 minutes.

Fehr calls Agreement Express “a complete game changer”, adding: “Before, we were always behind. Now we’re consistently up to date. No merchant is waiting an excessive amount of time to find out if they’re approved or not.”

In fact, merchants love the ease and efficiency of the new and improved Valmar workflow. Fehr says all merchant feedback has been positive across the board and the company is seeing significant improvement in all its underwriting and onboarding KPIs.

It’s not just Valmar’s merchants who are happy. Their staff are loving the change too.

“It has allowed our team to have a bigger bandwidth to focus on other areas that need improvement. We can now focus on areas that we didn’t have time for before,” says Fehr.

Agreement Express’ software also smoothly integrates with the company’s customer relationship management system, IRIS CRM, meaning staff can now access merchant data across multiple platforms to trigger underwriting actions.

And setup was easy, according to Fehr, who says: “Agreement Express works closely with you from start to finish to make the set-up process easy and simple. Aside from the amazing automation, scalability, and efficiencies, the integration with our CRM is absolutely top-notch.”

 

Digital Tools for a Cashless Era

 

Adopting Agreement Express marked a turning point for Valmar. With its scalability hurdles removed, the company is now reaping the rewards of embracing automation – seeing growth, high merchant satisfaction, and major efficiencies.

Modernizing its systems has allowed Valmar to reach its goal of becoming a “one-stop-shop” for merchants. But, more than that, it’s revolutionized the way the company does business, pushing it ahead of competitors to the cutting-edge of the digital era.

With merchant applications growing, Valmar now has an engine to support rapid business expansion – setting it up for continued success while less-nimble payment processors struggle to keep up.

Companies like Valmar can’t afford to be left behind. As contactless and cashless payments become the norm, payment processors have no choice but to follow Valmar’s lead. “Partnering with Agreement Express forced Valmar to reimagine our process from start to finish,” says Fehr. “Make sure you have a culture that’s ready to adopt these new processes and platforms. Make sure you’re ready for that kind of change.”

For payment service providers looking to follow Valmar and innovate their workflows, Agreement Express can help you take that next step. The Agreement Express suite improves business operations across the board, increasing your time to revenue, and boosting time-to-board. But don’t take our word for it – use our ROI calculator to crunch the numbers and see exactly how automation can impact your bottom line.

Contact Agreement Express today to find out more about our platforms or to schedule a demonstration.