Speed up merchant onboarding & servicing

One workspace to see all merchant activity, collaborate across teams and partners and guide the journey.

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How merchant services teams use CXMEngine.

Dynamic journey orchestration
Step-by-step workflows
Merchant onboarding & support
Streamline KYC/AML
Merchant self-service  
Real-time journey data analysis
Achieve higher activation & retention
No-code journey builder
Orchestrate customized sales, onboarding and support experiences in detail. Use automations to trigger progression, reduce manual processes and remove friction.
Ecosystem connectors
Stay in the loop when merchants engage with different teams and external vendors in any journey. Know what's next and who is responsible.
Real-time access to core and partner data
Remove data silos and see activity in real time so you can take faster action to support merchants.
AI tools and insights  
Embedded AI engines analyze your ecosystem and CX data and suggest ways to optimize and automate your merchant services delivery.
Rapid in-year ROI
Become a merchant services innovator without ripping and replacing legacy banking systems. One client increased retention by 17% in three months with OvationCXM.  
Streamlining CX in Merchant Services
In this interview with Glen Kelley, OvationCXM's CRO and a long-time expert in payments, he lays out the challenges of service delivery in a multi-party ecosystem like merchant services, and suggests strategies that remove friction and drive profit for this business unit.

Frequently asked questions

What is merchant services?

Merchant services is an suite of products and services offered to businesses to enable the processing of payments, in person and online. The global payments industry is expected to be 35% of total banking revenue by 2028. Due to the rise of embedded payments, real-time payments, BNPL and digital wallets, merchants need to offer multiple payment options to consumers to remain competitive.

What are the biggest challenges for banks offering merchant services?

Inefficient onboarding: Manual processes, multiple systems, different teams and external vendors and limited automation leads to delays and errors.
Siloed information: Customer information is stored in various places and sometimes with account managers themselves. Knowledge gaps between colleagues and teams are common, so servicing a shared customer requires reaching out to access updates and progress reports throughout the merchant services ecosystem. Not fast, not easy.
Impersonal and disjointed processes: Standardized, generic workflows may streamline work, but don’t personalize journeys by client needs, leading to frustration.
Poor communication and collaboration: Working across teams and with partner organizations is often done via phone calls and email threads, which is time-consuming and inefficient.
No real-time data visibility: Not only is data siloed and hard to access, but it’s not available in real time, when a customer needs help or a team is looking for answers to immediate issues. Without this data access, customers wait for resolution. And business decisions are made with limited inputs vs. data-driven certainty.
Complex regulatory environment: Regulatory requirements, such as KYC/AML and GDPR continue to be a burden to administer and to monitor.Suboptimal customer experience: Delays, errors and lack of transparency lead to poor experiences.
Suboptimal customer experience: Delays, errors and lack of transparency lead to poor experiences, affecting retention and cross-sell potential.
Increased competition: Fintechs have been gradually encroaching into merchant services, traditionally a bank-dominated market. Their digital expertise and agility may threaten this dominance and steal away a percentage of the business.

What are pain points in a bank's merchant services delivery?

One workflow that doesn’t cater to different segments: Onboarding steps are the same across different business sizes, types, industries etc.
Disconnected systems and information:
Banking teams use multiple systems and the data isn't shared across teams and vendors. Customers get bounced around and teams must research to help them, leading to slow go-lives and frustrated customers. 
Limited client self-service: Many steps are manual, document-intensive and not self-served.
Slow and opaque processes: Bank onboarding can take weeks or months, and the process is unclear to customers. 
Poor handoffs: Different teams handle different aspects of the journey but don’t work as one. That leads to redundant requests for the same information, affecting customer confidence and patience.
Gaps in employee training: Employees may not have enough training or product knowledge to answer questions or find answers for the complex payment ecosystem. 
Poor communication: Customers don’t know the steps and their current status in onboarding or servicing and don’t know what to expect or who to ask for help.

How does OvationCXM solve challenges in merchant services?

Our comprehensive CX orchestration platform streamlines workflows, enhances customer experiences and improves onboarding and operational efficiency for banks.

1. It integrates with banking systems you already use to aggregate all of your merchant activity and communication across different teams and partners on a single screen. In real time.

2. Once journeys are configured, our platform gives teams a single interface to manage the entire experience from end to end along with a client-facing portal to check on real-time journey progress. They can learn where they are in any given journey, what documentation is expected next and what is needed to move from A to B.

3. Lastly, our platform unlocks data from every single interaction to uncovers friction. This centralized data also serves as fuel for AI insights to recommend the most optimal path to adjust or reorder journey flows so merchants progress more quickly.