Onboarding Friction for PSPs – When Bureaucracy Meets the Blockchain

Anyone else finding the KYB (Know Your Business) process for new payment service providers increasingly… Byzantine? It feels like every time we try to integrate a new PSP, particularly one that touches the crypto rails, we're asked to provide the same 20 documents, but each time in a slightly different format, notarized by a different animal, and submitted through a portal that looks like it was designed in 2003. It's not just the sheer volume, but the constant back-and-forth, the vague rejections, and the feeling that you're constantly proving your legitimacy to someone who may or may not understand the underlying tech.

We've been eyeing a few providers that offer some excellent rates and quicker settlement times for certain regions, which is crucial for our smaller merchants, but the onboarding process has become such a significant barrier that it almost negates the potential benefits. The time spent on compliance and due diligence often translates to delayed launches and missed opportunities. Is this just the cost of doing business in a regulated space, or are there PSPs out there truly streamlining this experience? Or perhaps, are we just resigned to the fact that to move money quickly in the 21st century, one must first spend a month in the administrative purgatory of the 20th?