Last updated: 09 July 2026

Merchant onboarding is the first thing a merchant experiences of working with you, and the faster it goes, the sooner they start generating revenue. Open banking is one of the most effective ways to speed it up: with the applicant's consent, you can confirm a business's identity and its account ownership directly from the bank, in real time, in place of documents and manual checks. That can mean quicker approvals, fewer applicants dropping out along the way, and less manual work for your team.

This is the high-value, verifiable part of onboarding, and it is where account data does its best work. Your wider risk and compliance process runs as it does today; open banking can make the parts it touches faster and more reliable.

Exploring open banking for your onboarding flow? Book a call with Yapily.

This article covers:

• What merchant onboarding is and who is involved

• The merchant onboarding process, and where it gets slow and costly

• Which parts open banking can automate

• The benefits for a PSP, and onboarding as a service you can resell

• How account data works in practice, with Crezco as the worked example

It builds on our wider view of how PSPs deliver value beyond the checkout.

What is merchant onboarding?

Merchant onboarding is the process a payment service provider or acquirer runs to vet and activate a business before it can accept payments. It confirms the business is real and legitimate, assesses the risk of working with it, and sets up the account that lets it start trading.

Several parties touch the merchant onboarding process:

• The merchant: the business that wants to accept payments.

• The PSP or acquirer: the provider that vets the merchant and processes its transactions.

• The payment gateway: the layer that moves transaction data between the merchant and the provider.

For you as a provider, onboarding is more than a compliance gate. It is the first experience a merchant has of working with you, and it sets how quickly they can start earning.

The merchant onboarding process: where time and cost go

Traditional merchant onboarding is slow and resource-heavy because so much of it is done by hand. In Mastercard's Asia-Pacific research, onboarding a merchant the traditional way takes around three to seven days, and most applications still pass through manual channels.

Mastercard frames the full process as nine steps, running from the initial application through identity and business checks, risk assessment, and account set-up. Only some of those steps can be derived from a bank account; the rest are risk, underwriting, and compliance work. We come back to that boundary below.

From manual to digital merchant onboarding

The cost of manual onboarding rarely shows up as a single line item, which is why it is easy to underestimate. It is spread across chasing applicants to finish forms, correcting data-entry errors and reworking applications, and the headcount needed to review documents by hand. Around 80% of traditional applications run through manual channels such as phone and bank enquiries, which is where most of that effort goes.

Digital merchant onboarding moves those steps online and replaces manual review with automated checks where it can, which is what can cut both the delay and the cost.

Manual vs automated merchant onboarding

Here is how the two approaches compare on what actually drives cost and merchant experience:

What open banking can automate in merchant onboarding (and what it can't)

Open banking automates the account-derivable verification steps in merchant onboarding: confirming a business's identity and the ownership of its bank account, taken directly from the bank with the applicant's consent, rather than from documents the merchant scans and uploads. It does a narrow, high-value slice of the process well, which is exactly why it works.

The parts open banking automates

With the applicant's consent, an account information connection can:

• Confirm the business's bank account belongs to it, establishing account ownership.

• Verify identity details against what the bank holds.

• Replace bank-statement uploads with data taken straight from the source.

This is already in the market. Some providers now let an applicant confirm their bank account by logging in to their online banking and approving access, with the account verified in seconds and no statement to upload.

The parts it doesn't

Onboarding is a definitive stage with an end: once a merchant is through it, they are trading, not onboarding. Some checks that belong to that stage cannot be settled from a bank account, and open banking does not try to. It does not:

• Analyse the merchant's business model or web presence.

• Run background and reputational checks beyond what the bank confirms.

• Make the wider risk and compliance sign-off that closes the stage.

Account data can make the verifiable parts of onboarding faster and more reliable; it is one input into the stage, not the whole of it.

What it does change is what happens after onboarding. The same account information connection you used to verify a merchant keeps working once they are live: for ongoing monitoring of the accounts you have consent to see where customer consent remains valid, and for fresh checks when an existing merchant applies for something new, such as a credit or risk assessment on a new application. Onboarding is where account data earns its place; ongoing data and decisioning are where it keeps paying off, which is part of how PSPs deliver value beyond the checkout.

The benefits of automating onboarding with account data

Automating the account-derivable checks with open banking can speed a merchant's time to revenue, cut application drop-off, reduce manual error and fraud risk, and lower the cost and resource load of onboarding.

The gains line up with what merchants tell acquirers matters:

• Faster time to revenue: real-time verification can remove the days lost to manual review, helping merchants start trading sooner.

• Lower drop-off: in Mastercard's research, a simple, fast application is a top reason merchants pick an acquirer, and according to PYMNTS.com, 20% of merchants abandon onboarding. Removing paperwork from the verifiable steps keeps more applicants in the flow.

• Fewer errors and less fraud risk: data taken from the bank at source is harder to fake and less prone to re-keying mistakes than uploaded documents.

• Lower cost: fewer manual checks mean less chasing, less rework, and less headcount tied up in review.

Merchant onboarding-as-a-service

Merchant onboarding does not have to be something you only do for your own merchants. Enterprise PSPs can package onboarding capability, with open banking as the engine for the verifiable parts, and resell it to the high-volume platforms they serve.

Think of the platforms that bring on sellers, drivers, and couriers at scale: ride-hailing, food delivery, and online marketplaces. They need to verify large numbers of businesses and individuals quickly, and many would rather consume that capability than build it. Adyen, for example, serves platforms including Uber, eBay, and Just Eat, and uses account data to support onboarding and verification across European markets.

For a commercial team, can create opportunities to commercialise onboarding capabilities: a service that makes your platform clients stickier and opens up adjacent data and payments propositions alongside it.

Open banking merchant onboarding in practice

The clearest way to see what account data does for onboarding is to look at providers already using it.

Crezco: removing paperwork from onboarding

Crezco uses Yapily Validate to confirm customer and account details directly from the bank, with the customer's consent, which removes the need for paperwork and bank-statement uploads. As of its 2023 case study, Crezco supported more than 5,000 business customers and reported a net promoter score of +76. It is a working example of the account-derivable parts of onboarding handled through open banking.

The same approach is trusted at scale by larger providers: Adyen uses Yapily's account information services to speed onboarding and strengthen verification across European markets, and Google works with Yapily to deliver its bank account verification service for business customers in Europe.

Why PSPs choose Yapily for merchant onboarding

If you are evaluating open banking for merchant onboarding, here is what tends to matter most for a PSP, and the proof behind it.

Account data taken direct from the bank, not from documents

If your priority is accurate, reliable onboarding data with fewer manual checks, pulling identity and account details straight from the bank removes the weakest link: documents that can be out of date, mismatched, or forged. It is the same mechanism Crezco uses through Yapily Validate to take paperwork out of its onboarding.

One integration, 2,000+ banks across 19 markets

Yapily connects to more than 2,000 banks across 19 UK and EU markets, covering business and consumer accounts through a single integration. For a provider serving merchants in more than one country, that means you can verify businesses and the customers behind them without stitching together separate connections.

Proven infrastructure trusted by Adyen and Google

Onboarding sits on your critical path, so the infrastructure underneath it has to hold up. Yapily runs to a 99.5% uptime service level under its customer SLA and is trusted by Adyen and Google for account verification. That track record is the kind of evidence a risk and compliance owner can take to an audit.

Data and payments in one platform

If you are looking to grow revenue, having data and payments under one provider lets you build and resell more than verification: onboarding, account information, and account-to-account payments as one proposition, with fewer vendors to manage and less dependence on any single one.

The next step for merchant onboarding

Automating the verifiable parts of merchant onboarding is one of the clearest wins available to a PSP: faster approvals, fewer drop-offs, and less manual effort, all from a single account information connection. Confirming identity and account ownership straight from the bank can get merchants to revenue sooner and free your team from chasing paperwork, while the rest of your risk process keeps doing what it does best.

To see how that would work in your onboarding flow, see how Yapily supports merchant onboarding.

Sources

• Mastercard, Digital Merchant Onboarding report, April 2024 (Asia-Pacific research): acquirer-selection factors, onboarding time, share of manual applications, and the nine-step process.

• PYMNTS.com, "Onboarding Without Merchant Abandonment," 2018: merchant onboarding-abandonment figure (one in five, cited in the piece as ~20%).

• Adyen, onboarding and verification documentation (docs.adyen.com): instant bank-account verification.ds