Reimagining Merchant Onboarding with Agentic AI

Merchant onboarding has traditionally been a slow, manual process fraught with fragmented document checks, repetitive compliance reviews, and frequent delays. As digital business expands and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, financial institutions face a critical need to balance speed and compliance without drowning operations teams in paperwork or risking non-compliance.

Enter Agentic AI: an orchestrated, modular approach that’s transforming onboarding journeys for good.

Why Legacy Automation Falls Short

Merchants must submit diverse documents (e.g., Kbis, EIN, shareholder registers, ID proofs) depending on their legal form, jurisdiction, and risk profile. Traditional workflow tools can route tasks and flag missing information, but they fall short when it comes to adapting to evolving regulations or handling complex exceptions. Whenever a document doesn’t align, a field is illegible, or ownership spans multiple jurisdictions, manual review becomes inevitable. Meanwhile, compliance teams are burdened with fragmented dashboards and isolated databases, limiting visibility and slowing their ability to respond effectively.

The Promise of Agentic AI in Merchant Onboarding

Agentic AI orchestrates a unified network of autonomous agents, each specializing in a distinct step of the KYB process, working in harmony to ensure seamless, compliant, and efficient onboarding:

• Document Collection Agent
  Serving as the foundation of the onboarding process, this agent makes certain every required merchant document is uploaded correctly and flags missing or invalid items for swift resolution.
• Document Data Extraction Agent
  This agent automates the careful extraction and validation of all key identifiers and entity information from official registration documents, ensuring accuracy straight from authoritative sources.
• Supervisor Agent
  Acting as the coordinator, this agent assesses the merchant profile and determines which country-specific regulatory pipelines should be activated for verification.
• Data Validation Agent
  The gatekeeper for data integrity, this agent automatically checks for accuracy, performs sanctions and AML screening, and detects fraudulent or high-risk profiles in real time.
• Recommendation Agent
  As the final decision-maker, this agent compiles the outputs of all previous steps and generates a clear, auditable approval or rejection recommendation for the compliance team.

Merchant Onboarding Solution Architecture

Orchestrated, Transparent Workflows

Unlike rigid rule-based automation, agentic workflows can reason and adapt.  They execute parallel document checks seamlessly, such as Kbis and INSEE registry validation (Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques), UBO ID review (Ultimate Beneficial Owner Identification), IBAN (International Bank Account Number) risk scoring, and more. This ensures that no bottleneck halts the onboarding process.

Agents talk to both real and mocked APIs, making development and testing robust. When a document is missing or outdated, the merchant receives contextual notifications and receives precise step-by-step guidance to resolve issues efficiently. Every agent logs its decisions, building a rich audit trail that regulators and compliance teams can trust.

Real-World Business Benefits

• Accelerated Onboarding: Average onboarding times shrink from weeks to hours with agent-led document checks and adaptive flows.
• Sharper Accuracy: Modular, context-aware agents improve document and data validation accuracy by over 90%, consistently spotting mismatches and automating compliance for every revision.
• Audit-Ready Compliance: Each agent generates detailed logs, providing regulatory auditability and supporting fast exception analysis.
• Lower Costs: Automation with agentic AI cuts operational costs by up to 50%, freeing compliance teams to focus on strategic risk decisions while boosting workforce productivity.
• Adaptive Scalability: As new regulations or country requirements emerge, plug in new agents, update tools, and flex workflows instantly no code rewrites necessary.

Toward Autonomous Onboarding Operations

Agentic AI is becoming the de facto operating model for merchant onboarding. Continuous learning from historical onboarding reviews refines agent playbooks, while smarter orchestration means business teams and compliance experts to focus on strategic exception handling rather than repetitive processing.

With the rise of GenAI and agentic platforms, onboarding will no longer be a slow-moving compliance gate. It’s an intelligent, business-building journey. A strategic asset in the age of digital commerce.

At Persistent Systems, we’re helping financial institutions lead this transformation through Agentic AI: a modular, intelligent framework that doesn’t just automate tasks, but understands, adapts, and evolves with changing business processes. Our agents are designed to think and collaborate, handling document validation, ownership tracing, and compliance checks with precision and transparency. This empowers financial institutions to onboard merchants faster, mitigate risk proactively, and deliver seamless, secure experiences that build trust and drive growth.