Industry

Payment Processing

Core impact

• 87% time saved in total document review time

• Banking partner flagged fewer policy/procedural issues during audit

Implementation time with Kobalt

3 days, with no engineering lift on Payscout’s end

The Story

Payscout is the second largest payments processor in the collections space. They give merchants instant access to 100+ countries, billions of consumers and trillions of dollars, and were recognized by Inc. Magazine as one the fastest-growing American companies for three consecutive years.

The challenge 

Before Kobalt, the compliance review of policies, procedures, and merchant agreements was time consuming and painfully manual.

• The lean compliance team was responsible for maintaining dozens of policies and procedures, along with a constant influx of merchant agreements and documentation. Each document took 2-3 hours to review.

• Screening against and tracking updates to CFPB guidelines, Visa and Mastercard Card Brand Rules, and state regulations was entirely manual.

The solution and implementation 

During a 2-month long evaluation period, Payscout evaluated Kobalt based on its ability to:

• Automatically synchronize with all of Payscout’s external regulatory obligations

• Quickly and accurately screen hundreds of pages of documents for compliance gaps while providing citations

Implementation took three days. After this point, Payscout’s team was able to select relevant regulations, upload all compliance documentation, and kick off their first analysis.

The Impact

For the compliance team 

The compliance team reported an 87% time savings in document review time. 

“The capacity to handle our growing volume of compliance work is much better because Kobalt is doing the heavy lifting - replacing the amount of work that a team of reviewers might have accomplished”

Fran Fisher, Head of Compliance at Payscout

For every policy screened, Kobalt identified an average of five actionable improvements that would have previously taken 2-3 hours to surface. With Kobalt, these gaps were found and remediated within 15 minutes, allowing the team to focus on strategic follow-up work.

Payscout also processed all merchant agreements and third party materials through Kobalt, automatically identifying missing terms, key details, and nonstandard language before having to involve external counsel - saving time and money.

For banking partners 

Within four months, Payscout’s banking partner, Commercial Bank of California (CBC), noticed fewer policy/procedural issues during audits of documentation since June 2024.

This improvement was so significant that when Payscout introduced Kobalt’s team to CBC, the bank told Kobalt that they had been wondering what had changed at Payscout.

For the organization 

For Payscout, implementing Kobalt has upgraded their compliance review process from a bottleneck into a strategic advantage. The combination of faster reviews and higher capacity has allowed them to maintain rigorous compliance standards while scaling their business efficiently as a lean team.