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Merchant Onboarding: A Complete Guide to KYC, Risk Management & Payouts
Merchant onboarding is a critical step in building a trusted digital payments ecosystem. For banks, payment aggregators, payment gateways and merchant acquiring businesses, onboarding a merchant involves much more than collecting documents and activating a payment account. Businesses need to establish merchant identity, validate business credentials, assess potential risks and ensure that onboarding processes meet…
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Video PD for Loans: Faster Borrower Assessment and Underwriting
A loan application can contain financial statements, identity documents, bank records and other supporting information. Yet, for many lending decisions, there is still a need to speak directly with the borrower. This conversation can help lenders understand the purpose of the loan, clarify information in the application and develop a better picture of the borrower’s…
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Online Address Verification: A Faster, Remote Approach to Customer Onboarding
An address may seem like a straightforward detail to verify during customer onboarding. In practice, it can become one of the most time-consuming steps, particularly for banks, NBFCs, fintech companies and other businesses that rely on physical address verification. A field agent may need to visit the customer’s residence, coordinate a suitable time, collect evidence…
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eSign Provider Checklist for Businesses in 2026
Digital workflows have quietly become the backbone of modern business. Whether it’s onboarding customers, signing loan agreements, issuing offer letters, approving vendors, or executing contracts, businesses today depend heavily on fast and secure document execution. What once involved printing, signing, scanning, and manual approvals now happens in minutes. That shift has made eSign infrastructure mission-critical.…
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Deepfake vs Video KYC: Who Wins?
Digital onboarding has fundamentally transformed financial services. Opening a bank account, applying for credit, activating wallets, or onboarding merchants can now happen in minutes without paperwork, branch visits, or lengthy manual verification. At the center of this transformation sits Video KYC—a process built to make onboarding faster, compliant, and more secure. But a new threat…
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Merchant Onboarding Fraud: Red Flags to Spot
Whether you’re a payment aggregator, fintech platform, marketplace, lender, or SaaS provider, growth often depends on how seamlessly new merchants can start transacting. Faster onboarding means faster revenue, better merchant experiences, and improved competitiveness. But speed comes with a hidden risk. Fraudsters have become increasingly sophisticated in exploiting digital onboarding journeys. What appears to be…
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Top Fraud Risks in Digital Lending in 2026
The digital lending industry has come a long way from its early promise of instant approvals and paperless onboarding. Today, loan applications can be processed in minutes, customer journeys are fully digital, and alternative data has expanded credit access to millions of borrowers. But as lending becomes faster and more accessible, fraudsters are evolving just…
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5 Essential Checks for Fraud-Free Onboarding
A few months ago, a mid-sized lending NBFC told me something that stuck with me. They weren’t losing money to sophisticated fraud rings or deepfake KYC videos. They were losing it to the boring stuff — a PAN that didn’t match the name on the bank account, a “new” merchant whose GST number had already…
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Video KYC Audit Trail: What RBI Expects You to Store and for How Long
There’s a compliance conversation happening inside every regulated lending institution right now, and it’s not about whether to do Video KYC — that decision was made years ago. The conversation is about what happens after the call ends. Specifically: what did you record, where did it go, who can access it, how long does it…
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Re-KYC in Banks: When It’s Required, What It Covers, and How to Automate It
KYC gets a lot of attention when onboarding. Re-KYC, the periodic updation of that same information, gets far less — until an account is frozen, a compliance audit surfaces a gap, or the regulator issues a fresh circular reminding banks of obligations that were always there. For compliance teams and product managers building verification infrastructure,…
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Udyam Registration Verification: What It Means for MSME Lending
Walk into any credit team at a fintech or NBFC that does MSME lending, and you’ll find some version of the same conversation happening. An application comes in. The business looks legitimate. The Udyam certificate is attached. And somewhere in the process, someone has to decide: do we trust this document, or do we check…
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Video KYC for Insurance: IRDAI Guidelines vs Ground Reality in 2026
Ask most insurtech product teams what Video KYC for insurance looks like and you’ll get a confident answer. Ask them how many agents actually complete a VBIP session without a drop-off, connectivity issue, or a compliance gap, and the answer gets quieter. That gap — between what the guidelines say and what actually happens —…
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Hidden AI Fraud Risks in Customer Onboarding Journeys
There’s a quiet assumption baked into most digital onboarding flows: if a user passes the KYC checks, they’re legitimate. That assumption is getting more dangerous by the month. Fraud has always been part of the financial services landscape, but the nature of it has shifted. The fraudster of five years ago was someone who bought…