The challenge
A payment services business was onboarding new merchants through a form that emailed its contents to a shared mailbox, with supporting documents arriving as separate attachments that had to be matched to the right application by hand. A merchant who could not finish the form in one sitting lost everything and started again, and the most common reason for abandoning was needing to go and find a document.
Review was unstructured. Whoever picked up an application worked through it in whatever order made sense to them, and there was no consistent record of which checks had been performed — so an application that came back after a request for more information often had to be re-examined from the beginning. Merchants were told their application was "under review" with no more detail, and asked the same questions more than once.
Risk classification was applied from judgement and an internal document. Two reviewers could reasonably reach different conclusions about the same merchant, and there was no way to show, after the fact, which criteria had produced a given classification.
Our approach
We built an onboarding and review system with two halves that share one application record. The merchant-facing side is a resumable application: progress is saved as it is entered, a merchant can leave to find a document and return to exactly where they stopped, and documents are uploaded directly to encrypted cloud storage against the specific requirement they satisfy — so nothing has to be matched to an application by hand afterwards. The application shows which items are outstanding and, when information is requested, reopens only the affected section rather than the whole form.
The reviewer side turns assessment into an explicit checklist derived from the merchant's business type and the risk criteria that apply to it, so every application is examined against the same defined set of checks rather than in whatever order a reviewer chooses. Each check records its outcome, the reviewer, and the evidence it was based on, which means an application returning from a request for information resumes with the completed checks intact instead of being re-examined from scratch.
Risk classification was moved out of judgement and into configurable, versioned rules evaluated against the submitted data, producing a proposed tier and — importantly — the criteria that produced it. A reviewer can override the proposal, but an override requires a recorded reason and is itself auditable, so the classification of any merchant can be explained later by reference to the rule version in force at the time. Every action across both halves is written to an append-only audit log, and access to submitted identity documents is restricted to the roles that need it and logged when exercised.
Outcome
Merchants now complete an application across multiple sittings without losing progress, and their documents arrive attached to the requirement they satisfy. Reviewers work a defined checklist that survives a request for more information, and every risk classification carries the rule version and criteria that produced it, with overrides recorded and attributable.