How Teya tripled straight-through processing in customer onboarding with AI agents

About Teya

Teya's growth is as recognisable as its brand colour: it is one of Europe's fastest-growing acquirers, serving 75,000+ businesses across 9 countries with payments and business tools.

Teya is a frontier acquirer that invests heavily in efficient operational workflows. It set an ambitious goal to automate onboarding to 75% by year-end, and 90% by 2027, so that its operations keep pace with its growth. To get there, it needed a compliance partner that could move at the same speed.

The Challenge

One reason Teya wins so many new customers is that its onboarding is built around a single priority: high activation. The biggest bottleneck for activation rate is often the manual checks for proof of business. Confirming that each applicant was not fraudulent was largely manual, with multiple steps in the onboarding process slowing activation.

Growth also brought risk. As volumes increased, so did exposure to organised fraud, with bad actors applying through networks of linked applications that are hard to spot when each case is reviewed on its own.

The Solution

Since September 2025, Diligent has been Teya's key solution for removing manual proof of business checks from onboarding.

Teya defines its own risk appetite and configuration, in line with its policies and onboarding process. Diligent's AI agents run those checks on every applicant and return the result of each one alongside an auditable report based on Teya's configuration. Applicants that meet Teya's criteria move straight through to approval, driving a 3x increase in straight-through onboarding.

Diligent's proof of business covers four areas:

1. Registry lookup and context enrichment: we pull key business information from official registries to confirm activity and cross-check registered details. We also support lookups from alternative sector registries such as food hygiene ratings, waste carrier licences and trade listings.
2. Address intelligence: Diligent goes beyond checking that an address exists. It verifies both the registered and operating address, confirms the business actually trades there, and classifies what kind of premises it is.
3. Fraud and network signals: Diligent maps every applicant against known bad actors to catch first- and second-degree connections, and flags suspicious set-ups before they reach approval. Detection is tailored by industry, for example website policy and product catalogue checks for e-commerce businesses.
4. Built around Teya's customers: a significant portion of Teya's applicants are sole traders, who can't be assessed like limited companies. Rather than forcing them through checks designed for companies, and into human review as a result, Diligent built a sole trader-specific check around how sole traders operate and the evidence they can realistically provide.

The Results

Within one year, Teya achieved:

• 50% reduction in manual review queues: cases historically reviewed by hand are now processed automatically, freeing the team to focus on genuine risk.
• 18,000 hours saved on manual reviews annually.
• Double-digit reduction in fraud rates: lowering exposure to bad actors and protecting consumers from scams.
• Supercharged progress on Teya's automation goal: Teya is on track to reach 75% automation in its onboarding workflow by year-end.

Looking Ahead

Diligent continues to be Teya's trusted partner, working closely with the team to dive deeper into its onboarding and operational workflows. Together, they will automate more manual processes so the team can focus on high-risk cases and keep supercharging its operational goals.