Onboarding Hurdles: The Marathon, Not a Sprint

Anyone else feel like the onboarding process for new brokers or payment service providers has devolved into a multi-stage boss fight? We've been trying to set up a new trading account with a reasonably large institution, nothing boutique, and the Know Your Business (KYB) checks are just relentless. It's not just the sheer volume of documents – articles of incorporation, proof of address for every director back to their great-grandparents, utility bills for the office plant – but the constant moving of goalposts. You send in what they ask, then they come back with a new, slightly different request, often contradicting the previous one. It feels like they're actively trying to see if you'll just give up out of sheer frustration.

I get the need for compliance, absolutely. We're not trying to launder money through a shell company in a banana republic. But the inefficiency is staggering. It takes weeks, sometimes months, to get fully approved, by which time the market opportunity you were hoping to capture has often sailed. We've got pretty standard company structures, nothing exotic. Is this just the new normal, or have we stumbled upon a particularly bureaucratic corner of the financial world? Makes you wonder if they're actually trying to discourage new business.