Streamlining onboarding: SeQura’s 83% faster process enhances merchants’ experience

Meet SeQura

SeQura, a FinTech founded in Barcelona in 2013 by Swedish entrepreneur David Bäckström, has become a leader in the Buy Now Pay Later (“BNPL”) and flexible payments space, experiencing rapid and profitable growth. With over 1.5 million shoppers and thousands of merchants, SeQura is expected to achieve a €100m revenue run-rate on its 10th anniversary.

What sets SeQura apart is its vision to be the preferred payment, not only for merchants but also for its shoppers. They prioritize creating a state-of-the-art shopping experience for customers, resulting in optimized conversion rates and increased buying recurrence for merchants. Additionally, SeQura offers a diverse range of payment methods tailored to different sectors and businesses, making it a versatile payment option for many.

The challenge: Navigating the increasing regulatory checkpoints for a smooth start of the merchant's journey

SeQura, like most FinTechs, was born as a start-up –innovative and fast-paced. But unlike many, SeQura has succeeded in growing rapidly and profitably.

However, this growth has been accompanied by increasing Anti-Money Laundry (“AML”) regulations for financial solutions, bringing many pain points that threatened to slow progress.

Every new merchant onboarding was a victory. However, the information and document checks required during the Know Your Client/Business (“KYC/KYB”) for merchants could lead to a cumbersome first impression, and even drop-offs.

Until 2 years ago, SeQura’s compliance team relied on a manual and time-consuming process to gather all the information required to comply with these regulations.

The process was as follows: The sales team would contact the compliance team to notify them of a new merchant that needed to go through the KYB process to be accepted as a client. To clear all KYB checks, they would email instructions, checklists, and several attachments containing non-customizable questionnaires in PDF form. Because of its complexity, it involved multiple back-and-forth emails and calls.

SeQura’s team had to use post-its, notepads, and Excels to keep track of missing documents and information. Moreover, everything arrived scattered in the team’s inbox, which made the process difficult to follow.

“Via email, it was easy to miss a document, and there were too many emails. To collect 5 or 6 documents legally required we had to go through too long email threads. We could easily lose 2 weeks to collect 1 document. And the whole process could take 1 month.” – Sandra Martínez, Onboarding Operations Manager.

Likewise, the merchant would get frustrated by all the required information. Drop-offs were possible, and that also created friction between the sales team and the compliance team.

As sales grew, this manual process became unmanageable. SeQura needed a scalable solution to support its back-office and compliance team in keeping up with the increasing number of new clients’ onboardings.

The solution: From streamlining KYB to automating contract generation

SeQura started looking for a platform to minimize friction with the merchant during the onboarding while maintaining high compliance and security. Moreover, SeQura wanted to make KYB easier for the team and enhance efficiency. That's where Parallel came in.

SeQura first contacted Parallel in June 2021, and a month later the entire compliance team was using it for all Know Your Business of new onboardings.

“Our team experienced a significant transformation. They were able to centralize all KYB on a single platform, having all the requests under control. They no longer needed to chase customers. Errors and oversights of missing data were reduced to zero. Moreover, their workload was streamlined as they transitioned from managing full email inboxes to handling everything automatically.” – Sandra Martínez, Onboarding Operations Manager.

This enabled them to start accelerating merchants’ landing in SeQura, but that didn’t end there.

The onboarding process also included the creation and signing of SeQura’s services contract, which had to be sent in parallel to the compliance clearance.

This was also a time-consuming and manual process. Each contract was made ad hoc, modifying the prices or services in a Word template. Then, merchants' information was requested through email in a list, which was manually copied and pasted into the contract. Once completed, any request to change a clause had to go through legal.

In February 2022, SeQura decided to take its onboarding process to the next level by using Parallel for contract creation and signing as well.

The legal team started working with Parallel to create contract templates for all financing products and services. This caused a complete transformation of the onboarding process.

“In fact, automating KYB and contracts helped us evolve to adapt to sales growth. A new onboarding team was created. With an intensive training we were able to group certain tasks that previously required the intervention of different departments (compliance, legal and risks) –which also lengthened the process– into this single team to provide the best experience for the new merchant. This allowed other teams to focus on more specialized tasks.” – Irene Barrero, Strategic Project Enabler.

SeQura also leveraged Parallel’s integrations and features to make its onboarding process even more efficient and scalable:

• SeQura connected Parallel with Slack, so that the sales team could also get notified and track the onboarding status.

• SeQura also started connecting the CRM (Hubspot) with Parallel to automatically transfer information from the sales team to the KYB and the contract, saving time for the onboarding team and avoiding asking the merchant for the same information twice.

• SeQura will integrate third-party solutions to access global risk data for further verifications automatically.

On top of that, this improvement has been supported by tracking metrics provided by Parallel: process duration, conversion rates, time taken by the onboarding team to review the information, etc. This data has allowed SeQura to monitor and improve the onboarding, identify bottlenecks, test new ideas and scale the process.

This would have been impossible or extremely difficult to measure with an email-based process.

The benefits: Growing with happy merchants while staying compliant

“Parallel has provided us with the balance we were looking for between the least possible friction with the merchant during onboarding and an adequate level of compliance control, making our merchants happy and our team's work more efficient and easier.” – Irene Barrero, Strategic Project Enabler.

With the templates the team built for the first year using Parallel, the time to complete KYB and the contract was already reduced by 50% each.

However, as we like to say at Parallel, “process improvement is a continuous improvement process”. Our Customer Success team jointly reviewed the results, providing valuable recommendations and training on how to continue improving. SeQura decided to edit the process’ templates to make it even smoother.

Since then, SeQura has been able to:

• Reduce the KYB process time from 21 days-1 month on average to 4-5 days, meaning that SeQura gets all KYB information from the merchant 83% faster.

• Reduce the completion of contracts from 8-9 days on average down to 3-4 days, so contracts are collaboratively completed with merchants 55% faster.

Also, SeQura has sent more than 4,205 automatic reminders with Parallel, resulting in a total time savings of 701 hours. This translates to a weekly savings of 7 hours for the task of chasing merchants, which was previously a major source of friction.

SeQura's partnership with Parallel has revolutionized its onboarding process, enabling growth, giving merchants the best possible experience, while staying compliant throughout it all.