How to Eliminate RFIs and Accelerate Merchant Onboarding in Mexico

Requests for Information (RFIs) are follow-up requests sent to applicants when required documents are missing, outdated, or invalid in the initial application. They slow down your onboarding process, frustrate applicants, and kill conversion.

In merchant onboarding, RFIs are silent killers. They stall growth and create unnecessary back-and-forth that drives applicants away. In Mexico, they’re especially painful — over half of merchant applications require at least one RFI.

The good news? Most RFIs are preventable.

Why onboarding merchants in Mexico is uniquely challenging

B2B enterprises issue RFIs to reduce compliance risk, and with good reason. Financial institutions in Mexico face intense pressure to minimize compliance risks. Non-compliant organizations incurred nearly $330M MXN in regulatory fines in the first half of 2024 alone—a 106% increase from 2023.

But the real issue is that most KYB tools weren’t built for Mexico. They miss local requirements like:

• Ensuring Articles of Incorporation include registration receipts (boletas de inscripción)
• Ensuring the most recent updates to the company in Acta Asambleas are included
• Verifying that Address Proofs are issued within 3 months
• Confirming documents are complete and legible

The cost of friction

When your onboarding process triggers RFIs, everyone loses. Your applicants must gather additional documents, while your team gets pulled away from growth initiatives to chase merchants through WhatsApp and email.

This creates a destructive cycle:

1. Applicant frustration and drop-off: For every 10 seconds added to your application process, you risk losing an additional 5% of your applicants—and RFIs can extend this process by weeks. As a result, many of your applicants abandon their applications and pick competitors with more efficient onboarding.
   
   
2. Lost revenue: With application drop-off rates reaching as high as 70% for some enterprises, that means you lose 700 customers for every 1,000 applications. This translates to substantial lost revenue annually, depending on your organization's size. High abandonment rates also create a negative reputation that deters new applicants. Even worse, sales teams can spend nearly 30% of their time collecting documents instead of acquiring new customers, directly impacting your revenue pipeline.
   
   
3. Operational drain: Each RFI triggers a new round of manual reviews where ops analysts inspect complex, non-standard documents. This process takes 3–7 days of your team’s bandwidth on average. When teams are at capacity, you often need additional staff, which requires time-consuming KYB training.

Eliminate RFIs with an AI-powered KYB workflow

The best way to avoid RFIs? Prevent them entirely. Niva’s AI-powered KYB platform is purpose-built for Mexico and stops bad data at the source.

Take Aplazo, for example. Before Niva, blurry uploads and outdated documents triggered RFIs in over half their applications. With real-time validation during upload, those issues are now resolved before submission.

“Real-time data validation has freed up all the hours we used to spend chasing merchants online,” their Operations Manager, Jose Antonio Yañez, reports. “We now see significantly less drop-off during the application process.”

This transformation allowed the BNPL platform to "hyperscale merchant growth while raising our compliance bar," adds Alex Wieland, Aplazo's CRO, while simultaneously providing applicants with a seamless onboarding experience.

Improve your applicant experience and unlock growth with Niva

Niva is the only AI-powered KYB solution built for Mexico's regulatory landscape. The platform allows you to cut RFIs by nearly 90% while increasing verification accuracy by >95% and minimizing compliance risk. Here’s how:

• Pre-filled application fields: Niva automatically populates applications with current data from local government registries, company websites, and other 3P sources. That way, you decrease manual inputs, reduce errors, and provide a seamless submission process.
  
  
• Real-time validation of customer inputs: Niva flags missing or invalid uploads on the spot, before they ever reach your ops team and while your customer is still submitting the application so that they can quickly correct the submission on the spot. 
• Fast, accurate reviews: Once the documents have all been collected, applications move from submission to verification in under 10 minutes, thanks to a highly accurate, AI-driven analysis of even the most complex, non-standard documents.

The result is an A+ applicant experience that drives conversions without disruptive back-and-forths, making it nearly impossible for customers to choose a competitor over you. 

Interested in learning more? Book a demo today.

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