Enterprise payment companies are onboarding more merchants than ever, but rising compliance demands, higher risk costs, and outdated workflows are slowing approvals and killing conversions.

When businesses apply to process payments, Onboarding teams must determine whether they sell prohibited goods, operate in restricted categories, or misrepresent their business model.

Traditional approaches rely on low-precision keyword checks and slow expensive multi-step manual review. Analysts review websites, business descriptions, and documentation to classify merchants and assign the correct Merchant Category Codes (MCC). This creates three main problems:

1. MCC misclassification – Incorrect codes cause interchange fee losses and compliance risk.
2. Regulatory complexity – Varying regional and partner policies are difficult to navigate and easy to misapply.
3. Operational overhead – Manual reviews increase costs and slow onboarding.

For processors managing millions of merchants, these inefficiencies scale quickly, adding workload, increasing regulatory exposure, and impairing interchange revenue.

SafetyKit turns onboarding from a weeks-long cost center to a high-converting revenue driver. Our AI platform replaces manual reviews with real-time, rule-based risk decisions, turning merchant onboarding from a slow process into a scalable advantage.

SafetyKit achieves over 95% accuracy in enterprise Merchant Monitoring operations. This precision comes from multi-modal analysis: a single large language model reviews all merchant data, interpreting content for policy violations and identifying prohibited goods across images and video. Continuous learning on platform-specific data further improves performance over time. Support for 193 languages removes translation delays, and SKU-level analysis enables product-specific risk detection that traditional business-level reviews often miss.

Automated Risk Intelligence

SafetyKit’s AI platform automates merchant investigation from end to end. It ingests payment companies existing onboarding standards along with industry-standard underwriting workflows, scans merchant applications, websites, and products in real time, and investigates across the web to understand the true nature of a merchant’s business.

Core workflow

1. Policy ingestion – SafetyKit maintains a live rulebook covering payment network policies, regional regulations, and platform-specific restrictions.
2. Web-scale investigation – AI agents review hundreds of pages per merchant, analyzing text, images, video, and metadata from websites, social media, and public records.
3. Risk decisioning – The system detects prohibited business models, restricted products, merchant fraud, and registration requirements.
4. MCC classification – Algorithms assign the correct MCC with 98.8% accuracy and flag potential interchange impact.

Output: Automated risk decisions in seconds, including business categorization, MCC assignment, product-level risk flags, and identification of missing data.

Business Impact at Scale

For payment companies, SafetyKit delivers measurable operational and financial impact:

• Lower operational costs – Automated decisioning reduces manual investigations across Onboarding teams.
• Faster onboarding – Instant risk assessments accelerate merchant activation and drive higher TPV growth.
• Accurate MCC assignment – Correct classification prevents interchange fee leakage and network penalties.
• Deeper partner insight – Rich merchant data strengthens risk modeling and supports advanced underwriting.
• Adaptive compliance – AI-driven policy enforcement scales effortlessly across regions and regulations.

For merchants, automated approvals enable go-live within seconds, removing review delays that cause abandonment and lost revenue. With over 95% accuracy, SafetyKit minimizes false positives and ensures compliant merchants are approved without friction.

Conclusion: Scaled Onboarding with Human-AI Collaboration is the Only Path Forward

As payment platforms expand into emerging and regulated categories such as adult content, cannabis, and tobacco, manual review can no longer keep pace. The growing complexity of regulations, mounting risk exposure demand an automated solution, and rising operational costs. SafetyKit delivers that automation with enterprise-grade accuracy, allowing onboarding teams to focus on edge cases, policy development, and strategic growth instead of routine merchant review.

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