Since the late ’90s, 1stMILE (formerly Merchant Partners) has been online (on the road) as a software technology company providing a commerce platform for the automotive marketplace. At one time, businesses in the industry, such as auto service dealers or tire stores, were using multiple terminals within their shops depending on whether the consumer was using a Visa, Mastercard, or American Express credit card, and new shops coming online with software vendors were filling out merchant applications via pen and paper.

“We looked at that as a great opportunity to consolidate,” said Phillip Horvath, Senior Vice President Client Relations & Service Strategy, who notes that the company is a leading provider of integrated payment services for the automotive space.

But bringing all of the different service providers together in a unified application required significant data orchestration to a multitude of downstream systems.

Working with engineers, 1stMILE developed an algorithm to determine low-risk merchants as a way to speed up the boarding and underwriting process in North’s system even more — oftentimes gaining approval within minutes, a process that previously had taken days, or sometimes weeks to complete the stringent United States customer KYC (Know Your Customer) and due diligence checks.

Once the approval clears, the final steps are set into motion: an account is automatically created in the 1stMILE payment gateway, PCI service provider portal and in the 1stMILE Academy while a welcome email is sent from the boarding system to the auto service shop owners.

“I can now provide a salesperson a device, they can return to the merchant, plug in the device and have their 1stMILE software configured automatically, allowing them to be processing the same day. That just didn’t happen before,” Horvath said, referencing the previous process, which entailed sales agents working with automotive shops to fill out applications, a process that was error-prone and time-consuming, and improved the merchant onboarding process from days to hours.

“When you turn these things around faster and get a customer processing much quicker, what we’ve found is if you can get a customer processing, the likelihood that they are going to leave you is very low.”

Now, Horvath says the goal is to make sure all those customers are supported as much as possible, just as the initial integration was supported by North. “Really anything that we came up with or found was acted upon quickly by the North API team, and we were never sitting around for days or weeks thinking when are they going to get something fixed or changed.”

And because all the data is now streamlined and organized, 1stMILE can proactively advise merchants before they encounter a problem. And, at the same time, the goal for the next year is to make it easier for automotive service shops to schedule support related calls through that same merchant portal.

All of this extra help is made possible and supported by the resources that are no longer tied up with data and process implementation, according to Horvath. “We are not trying to remove humans from the process, but where we can automate a process and better use the resources we have in other areas, that’s my goal.”