Anqa helped Paypercut turn manual merchant onboarding into a same-day automated process that reduces churn, ensures compliance and gives Paypercut the operating leverage to scale.

"Moving onboarding from 10 days to same day is not just  an operational win. It means merchants and partners have a great experience and a positive first impression of Paypercut. That is the lifeline of the business coming in."  

-  Gareth Walsh, COO & co-founder, Paypercut

Executive summary

Paypercut is a venture-backed European payments platform designed to help online-first businesses accept and manage payments through a single, flexible integration. Built for merchants operating across European markets, it supports cards, digital wallets, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) options, payment links, QR payments, recurring billing, subscriptions, split payments, and local-currency payouts.

Already the largest BNPL aggregator in Central and Eastern Europe and beginning to experience rapid growth, Paypercut’s existing manual merchant onboarding process became a major problem. Reliant on people and various third parties, delays at times exceeded 10 days. Onboarding wasn’t just a headache, it was causing churn and lost revenue.

Anqa built Paypercut a merchant onboarding workflow using its risk management orchestration platform. By connecting the siloed systems, building consumer-grade web portals, and automating the process, Paypercut is now able to onboard merchants within the same day.

Why onboarding had become a growth constraint

Paypercut faced a familiar growth-stage payments problem. Currently pre-license and working with a licensed acquirer, KYC/KYB requirements needed to be fast, consistent and defensible, but engineering capacity was focused on the core payments platform. The default path was manual: collect information, run checks, coordinate with acquirers, request follow-up and track status across tools.

    "A payments business is like a sports car. You can have a  fast engine, but if the KYC process is weak, the tires spin out."  

As a result, boarding time could exceed 10 days. Manual processing may have worked for the first merchants but was costing Paypercut lost revenue and preventing them from scaling.

In addition to the lost revenue, as a venture-backed payment company unit economics are incredibly important to Paypercut. Their existing process wasn’t capable of tracking per-onboarding costs and high reliance on people wasn’t aligned with a cost efficient and scalable process. Lastly, being pre-license, they needed a process that generated evidence on every onboarding.

    "Merchant onboarding is a triangle with three categories  to balance: merchant friction, cost, and risk management. Anqa let us decide  what balance we want and lets us change our mind without ripping everything  out and starting over again."  

What Anqa built to make same-day onboarding possible

To solve this problem, Anqa built an onboarding workflow for Paypercut on Anqa’s risk management orchestration platform. This enabled Paypercut to centralize and automate the process end-to-end, from merchant intake, data providers, rules-based routing through to KYC review and triggering account activation.

    "We chose to work with Anqa because their platform let us build the workflow we needed. This meant they never said no. Every data provider, rules-based routing, user experience, and edge-case was incorporated into our workflow and the end result is better than we ever  expected."  

Onboarding portal. Anqa built Paypercut an onboarding portal for their merchants using Anqa’s AI interface builder. This enabled Paypercut to quickly iterate on designs to ensure merchants face minimal friction. Given Paypercut’s Central European merchant focus, this portal was built to natively support multiple languages. Merchants are now able to submit the onboarding documentation in their native language through a consumer-grade web application, a first for the market.

Third party data providers. Paypercut calls on a variety of third party data providers as part of the merchant onboarding flow. This includes risk checks, sanctions screening, AML screening, ID verification checks, and others. These providers were seamlessly integrated into the workflow using Anqa’s workflow builder, with Anqa’s team able to connect the various providers and standardize the data into one, centralized place. Anqa’s analytics makes it easy for Paypercut to manage per-onboarding unit economics and identify which providers need to be augmented or replaced.

KYC case management. Anqa built Paypercut’s KYC team a centralized case management interface using its AI interface builder. This provides analysts with the information they need to make decisions in a simplified, easy-to-use platform. Being directly embedded into the workflow meant it was possible to route escalations inside the workflow. This means instead of tracking down emails, the KYC team can manage the entire process from the platform, with Anqa’s workflow automating the rest.

Hand-off and account integration. At the end of a successful onboarding workflow, account activation is triggered automatically. Anqa built an API connection with Paypercut’s acquirer, sending full onboarding details enabling them to automatically provision an account. This, in tandem with programmatically triggering Paypercut’s platform enables merchants to be onboarded automatically as soon as they’re approved.

Results: a workflow that enables growth

Same-day merchant onboarding. Paypercut moved from an onboarding time that exceeded 10 days to same-day boarding. Paypercut can now capture demand while merchants and partners are ready to act, and realize revenue immediately.

Consumer-grade merchant experience. Onboarding is a high touch-point and historically frustrating process for merchants, that when done poorly leaves a bad impression. Paypercut’s new merchant onboarding portal is modern, streamlined, and creates minimal friction for the merchant.

Scalable KYC operations. Paypercut no longer has to treat every onboarding case as a manual project. Straightforward cases can move through a system-based workflow, while analysts focus on exceptions, edge cases and decisions that require judgment.

Faster iteration without distracting engineering. Paypercut can tune onboarding as new providers, partner requirements or screening steps come online. That allows the team to keep improving conversion and controls without pulling scarce engineering capacity away from the core payments platform.

Stronger controls and fewer human errors. Speed does not come at the expense of compliance. Rules, approvals, escalations and account-creation triggers are embedded in the workflow, producing a more consistent and auditable process than person-based handoffs.

    "Because it is system based rather than person based, it is removing human error. It is more scalable and more accurate."  

From zero to live in less than a quarter

Anqa delivered the initial deployment through a hands-on implementation model. An Anqa forward-deployed engineer worked directly with Paypercut's product, engineering, KYC and legal teams to build Paypercut’s workflow on the Anqa platform. Weekly calls kept delivery aligned across functions, while the team iterated on workflow details as operational requirements became clearer.

Gareth estimated that Anqa built the workflow in about a tenth of the time it would have taken to build in-house, while producing a solution tuned to Paypercut's specific onboarding use case.

    "The deployment was an excellent experience. They not  only corralled all the teams to deliver a cross-functional product, they met  every deadline and were the driving force behind the project."  

More importantly, this set the foundations for Paypercut to innovate. By leveraging Anqa’s infrastructure and risk management orchestration platform, they’re able to continuously iterate at speed. Anqa’s platform provides the data and analytics to show where the bottlenecks exist and provide per-boarding costs. This data empowers Paypercut to iterate and improve the onboarding workflow, with Anqa’s low-code workflow builder enabling new releases on a weekly basis, not quarterly. Paypercut expects that over the coming twelve months the onboarding experience will materially evolve, only widening its advantage over its competitors.

Why this matters for Series A payment companies

For Series A and growth-stage payment companies, onboarding is often the first operating system to break. The company has product-market pull, partners are ready to send volume and regulatory expectations are rising, but the internal process still depends on manual KYC coordination, point tools and email.

    "Most payment companies at our stage do KYC manually because there is not space in the development pipeline while they are building the core product. Anqa enabled us to solve this bottleneck in a tenth the time we could have, without even diverting engineering resources."  

The Paypercut case shows a different path. Instead of forcing the engineering team to build a full onboarding platform internally, Paypercut used Anqa as the orchestration layer. The company kept control over its risk appetite, data providers and review decisions while replacing manual handoffs with a governed workflow.

The strategic benefit is that onboarding becomes infrastructure for growth. Faster activation reduces churn. Cleaner merchant intake improves conversion. System-based controls make compliance more robust. Unit-economics track onboarding costs and where the workflow can improve. The result is a process Paypercut can scale and keep optimizing as merchant volume grows.

Conclusion

Paypercut set out to solve a problem many payments companies face at a similar stage: the process that helped onboard the first merchants was not the process that would support scalable, partner-led growth. Manual onboarding created delays, introduced operational risk and made it hard to capture demand at the speed the business needed.

By partnering with Anqa, Paypercut turned merchant onboarding into a repeatable, automated and quantifiable system. In three months, Paypercut moved from a manual, ad-hoc process that took 10+ days to a workflow capable of same-day onboarding. That reduction protects the funnel, improves the merchant experience and gives Paypercut the operational efficiency to scale.

    "We’re now in a position where we can compete on risk  management. Our onboarding experience is second to none and we’ve built a  scalable solution that’s turned risk into a competitive advantage."  

The lesson is simple: onboarding is not a back-office function. It’s directly connected to revenue. When it is orchestrated well, it becomes infrastructure for growth.

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You can learn more about Paypercut at: paypercut.com