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When underwriting becomes a bottleneck, business growth stalls.
Here's how Kurv transformed their risk function into a growth enabler, and caught more risk in the process.
AT A GLANCE
Kurv is a US payments company serving 30,000+ SMBs. Their manual underwriting process was holding them back. Here's how they cut review times to support growth.
The problem: Merchant underwriting reviews taking multiple weeks; critical risk signals going undetected; 90% false-positive risk alerts.
The result: Kurv overhauled how they assess and onboard merchants. 94% faster underwriting; 3× submission volume on the same headcount; 35% reduction in cost-to-serve.
THE CHALLENGE
Speed and integrity, without compromise
For Dan Stanbridge, Chief Risk & Compliance Officer at Kurv, success is a balancing act between four groups: commercial teams, the risk department, partner banks and card networks. Meeting risk and underwriting requirements across all four doesn't just create friction. It blocks growth. And when volume doubles, you can't just double the team.
The root cause is data. Hard data such as credit scores, addresses, or liens, is straightforward. The research around a merchant’s true profile is not.
The biggest challenge in underwriting has always been around what I call ‘unstructured data’. It's really easy to pull a credit score. What's always been difficult is the research around the merchant.
Dan Stanbridge, Chief Risk & Compliance Officer, Kurv
Traditional checks can make a merchant look good on paper: strong KYC, clean credit, solid processing history. But they leave blind spots. Connected businesses, hidden categories, MCC miscoding, subtle signals in reviews or social media: the kind of intelligence that's difficult to find when you're eyeballing it yourself across multiple sources.
When Dan joined Kurv, underwriters were spending up to 30 minutes per merchant manually trawling the internet, searching for information that "may not even exist”. No single view of a merchant. No way to connect the dots.
Critical signals could go undetected, meanwhile 9 out of 10 internal risk alerts were false positives. The team was buried in alerts that didn't warrant attention.
THE SOLUTION
From manual research to instant intelligence
Dan and his team had mapped the existing process end-to-end, identified the gaps, and gone looking for vendors who could fill them. He wanted technology built on AI: tools that could do at scale what a team of analysts was doing manually. Not another vendor with a static product, but a partner willing to evolve alongside Kurv as the risk function grew. TrueBiz ticked every box.
A single TrueBiz report now replaces 30 minutes of manual research. For Kurv’s underwriters, it meant having everything they needed on one page in under 30 seconds, with no excuse to miss a data point.
The single view that surfaces accurate, relevant information makes life significantly easier for my underwriters. They have no excuse to miss anything now. It’s right there at their fingertips.
Dan Stanbridge, Chief Risk & Compliance Officer, Kurv
The UX was easy to follow, and they could see immediately how to use it. And critically, it was cost effective in a way that made scaling and full automation viable.
Equally important was how the relationship started. Before contracts were signed TrueBiz gave Kurv free access to the platform to test merchants they already knew, both good and bad. As Dan puts it: "Some vendors promise everything and then you go live and realise the product isn't what you expected. With TrueBiz, we knew exactly what we were getting."
After a two-week incubation period, they went fully live.
THE IMPACT
A risk function built to grow
94% faster | 3× volume | 30 min → 2 min |
Underwriting turnaround | Same headcount | Per merchant review |
Faster decisions, more business. Underwriting times fell by 94%. Submission volume trebled with the same headcount. Each merchant review was 15x faster. Kurv could now promise agents and partners a competitive turnaround and mean it. The pipeline opened up.
The risks hiding in plain sight. Acting on "suspicion rather than proof" as Dan puts it, is no longer the only option. Hidden redirects, MCC mismatches, adverse signals: now visible before a merchant is onboarded. Unusual processing activity? The compliance team now pulls a TrueBiz report first: concrete evidence rather than a hunch.
Decision integrity and consistency. “Fingerprint transparency” with every data point surfaced automatically in one clear report. No fragmented checks. No excuse to miss a data point. Nine out of ten risk alerts were noise before. Now the team focuses on cases that actually matter. For Dan, that mattered as much as the headline numbers: a happier, more focused team making better decisions.
A team that scales with the business. The cost to serve each merchant fell by 35%. Not because the team grew. Because the same team could handle a much larger portfolio.
A partnership built to last. TrueBiz became Kurv's internal proof point for AI-native tooling in practice. For both businesses, this is what a modern technology partnership looks like: evolving together and building something that gets more valuable over time.
Want to know what you might be missing?
Run your known problem merchants through TrueBiz. See what your current process isn't catching.