Merchant onboarding is the process by which a business is registered, verified, and approved to accept card payments. It encompasses everything from collecting the merchant’s business details and banking information to performing identity verification, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance checks before the merchant can begin processing transactions. For a standalone business working directly with an acquiring bank, onboarding can take days or weeks and involve extensive paperwork. For platforms onboarding sub-merchants at scale, the process must be streamlined, automated, and compliant — all while maintaining the security and risk controls that card networks and regulators require.
The core of merchant onboarding is Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) verification. The platform or acquirer must confirm that the merchant is a legitimate business, that its principals are who they claim to be, and that the business does not pose unacceptable risk — for example, operating in a prohibited industry, having a history of excessive chargebacks, or being associated with fraud or money laundering. These checks typically involve verifying government-issued identification, cross-referencing sanctions and watchlists, validating business registration documents, and assessing the merchant’s financial history and processing volume expectations.
For platforms facilitating payments on behalf of many merchants, onboarding speed and conversion rate are critical metrics. Every additional step, form field, or day of waiting in the onboarding process increases the risk that the merchant will abandon the process and take their business elsewhere. The best platform payment experiences make onboarding feel effortless — collecting the minimum required information upfront, performing verification checks asynchronously, and activating the merchant for processing as quickly as possible while layering in additional monitoring and stepped limits as the merchant builds a transaction history.
Shuttle Global supports merchant onboarding as part of its platform payments infrastructure. When a platform integrates Shuttle’s Embedded Payments, Shuttle manages the onboarding workflow for sub-merchants — collecting required information, performing KYC/KYB checks, and activating merchants for processing across Shuttle’s network of 40+ PSPs. Because Shuttle is PSP-neutral, a merchant onboarded through Shuttle is not locked into a single acquirer; the platform can route that merchant’s transactions through whichever PSP offers the best performance, cost, or payment method coverage for their specific needs. This approach combines onboarding speed with long-term commercial flexibility, letting platforms grow their merchant base without the regulatory complexity of becoming a registered payment facilitator themselves.