Anton Payments onboards merchants 30x faster than industry standard with Persona
Merchant onboarding in the payments industry is slow, expensive, and riddled with compliance shortcuts. Ryan Olson founded Anton Payments to prove it doesn't have to be.
Anton Payments is a B2B2C payments platform founded by Ryan Olson. The company serves merchants across sectors such as marketplaces and digital content platforms, who use the platform to process payouts to end-users, like content creators.
Problem: Anton Payments needed to quickly onboard merchants without compromising on compliance
Ryan built Anton Payments with a level of commitment to compliance that only comes from experience.
While most companies treat compliance as a checkbox, Ryan sees it as the foundation of a successful business. After years of watching businesses take shortcuts and suffer the consequences, he set out to build a payments platform where compliance wasn't an afterthought. "When I began speaking to VCs about Anton Payments, that story became part of my pitch," Ryan explains. "I believe in compliance first."
Unfortunately, it's easy to see why companies try to take shortcuts during onboarding.
In the payments industry, onboarding a merchant takes 92 days on average, with acquisition costs ranging from $2,500 to $11,000 per merchant. "MLROs, chief compliance officers, underwriting teams — they freeze in time," Ryan explains. "They'll get one red flag that doesn't make sense, and they don't want to say no because saying no is bad. But they don't want to say yes because saying yes could be worse."
This caution compounds in high-volume verticals such as digital content platforms and marketplaces, where global regulatory scrutiny is intense and fraud risks are elevated. But Ryan believed the status quo wasn't sustainable.
His goal: onboard merchants in three business days while maintaining the highest compliance standards.
To achieve this, Anton Payments needed an automated verification system that could handle both Know Your Business (KYB) checks for merchants and Know Your Customer (KYC) checks for end-users receiving payouts. The system needed to collect comprehensive documentation, validate authenticity, return detailed data, and work across multiple jurisdictions.
Most importantly, it needed to deliver both speed and security — thorough enough to satisfy regulators, accurate enough to catch sophisticated fraud, and fast enough to support Ryan’s ambitious three-day onboarding goal.
I was always hodgepodging two products together. The fact that I was able to do a single integration for all of my requirements with Persona is huge.
Solution: Anton Payments automates KYB and KYC verifications with Persona's data-rich platform
Ryan spent months evaluating identity verification providers. Ultimately, he chose Persona for the following reasons.
Everything in one unified platform
Most vendors Ryan evaluated would’ve forced him to choose between KYC or KYB. "I was always hodgepodging two products together," Ryan says. "The fact that I was able to do a single integration for all of my requirements with Persona is huge."
Persona's unified identity platform handles both sides of Anton Payments' verification needs. For merchants, that means business registry verification, document verification for articles of incorporation and certificates, ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) verification, and watchlist, sanctions, and adverse media reports. For end-users receiving payouts, Persona handles government ID verification with optional selfie, database verification, TIN verification, and phone and email risk reports alongside the same watchlist and sanctions checks.
“While Anton Intelligence can do some of these checks currently, isolating this into a single enterprise provider allows our AI to focus on the daily business and verify our ORS is fed the right information at the right time,” Ryan explains.
Critically, Persona is able to validate documents across multiple geographies and adapt to regional variations in document types, formats, and validation requirements without requiring Ryan to configure different verification flows for each jurisdiction. This was essential for Anton Payments' geographic footprint spanning the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and more.
Together, these capabilities eliminated the complexity of managing multiple vendors while providing geographic coverage across Anton Payments' target markets.
API quality and granular data that powers automated decisions
Ryan built Anton Payments with a proprietary AI engine at its core called Anton Intelligence. The Anton Intelligence Layer produces risk scores by analyzing data from multiple inputs, and Persona immediately became one of its most valuable sources.
"My AI loves Persona," Ryan says. "Persona provides a confidence score that tells you exactly how recognizable a document is. Most providers don't give you that granularity."
Ryan knows this firsthand, as he tested Persona rigorously, submitting the same document multiple times with small variations to see if the confidence score would reflect the change. "Persona’s system noticed something was manually being covered. That's huge," he explains.
Beyond confidence scores, Ryan also appreciated that Persona returns comprehensive data on every completed case, enabling Anton Payments to make informed decisions. "The plethora of data that's returned on a completed case, the amount of scoring Persona provides, it's phenomenal,” says Ryan.
This data quality proved critical because Anton Payments makes no verification decisions without two datasets: its internal Intelligence Layer and Persona's verification data. "I am equally dependent on both," Ryan says. "Without one or the other, we can't make the decisions that make our product work."
My AI loves Persona. Persona provides a confidence score that tells you exactly how recognizable a document is. The amount of scoring it provides, the plethora of data that's returned on a completed case, it's phenomenal.
Self-serve implementation backed by a connected team
As a technical founder, Ryan also valued the ability to integrate independently. With Persona's clear API documentation, he was able to build the full integration covering every endpoint in under one week.
"Persona’s documentation is up to date and clean, which is phenomenal," Ryan says. "I was able to completely integrate its system into our ops portal. Nobody will ever look at Persona’s portal on my site. There's no need for it. It's all integrated."
But self-serve didn't mean going it alone. When Ryan needed support, Persona's team seamlessly stepped in. "I have never met a team that is so connected," he explains. "Everything ran through one person until it didn't, and then that full handoff went to the next person. I didn't even see it happen. That's nutty."
This balance between self-serve tooling and responsive support was especially valuable when Ryan was simultaneously negotiating contracts, building integrations, and racing toward launch. "I built Persona’s API while in contract negotiations in under 30 days," Ryan notes. "The fact that I was able to do that, and the team was there when I needed them, that's what makes Persona great."
This is my legacy, and I'm glad to have Persona as part of it.
Results: Anton Payments onboards merchants 30x faster at 90% lower cost with Persona
Since implementing Persona, Anton Payments has fundamentally changed what's possible in merchant onboarding.
Most companies in the payments industry take 92 days to onboard a merchant. Anton Payments does it in three — a 30x improvement. This is possible because Persona automates the most time-consuming parts of verification: document collection, validation, and KYC checks on UBOs.
"Once the application is completed and comes to us, our team can make a decision in three days. That's based on Persona collecting all the documentation we need, start to finish, and validating it," Ryan explains. "By setting up our core requirements early and implementing them into the case setup with Persona, our team is not reviewing incomplete packages and can focus on the approval, not being document chasers."
The speed translates directly to cost savings, as humans only intervene when truly necessary thanks to Persona taking on most of the heavy lifting. Ryan estimates Anton Payments' onboarding costs at roughly $193 per merchant, including approximately $10 in Persona verification costs, $1.11 in compute costs, and $60 to $110 in human review time for more complex cases. That's more than 90% lower than the industry average of $2,500 to $11,000 per merchant.
And when humans do intervene, Persona makes sure they have everything they need. Before going live, Ryan ran 20 prospective merchants through the full onboarding flow. His team approved 16, or 80%, in under 24 business hours — no back-and-forth, no chasing documents.
The numbers make it clear just how central Persona has become to Anton Payments' operations, and Ryan sees that role only growing from here. The company plans to offer KYC verification as a value-added service to merchants, allowing them to use Persona to verify their own end-users and beneficiaries through Anton Payments' platform.
The partnership has become so essential that Ryan puts it in stark terms. "In the worst-case scenario that I don't get VC funding, I'll be paying the Persona bill out of my own pocket," he says. "I can't thank the team enough. This is my legacy, and I'm glad to have Persona as part of it."
