Merchant Inspector. Merchant Onboarding and Content Monitoring
Merchant Inspector is a platform for automated onboarding and monitoring of e-commerce merchants, built for banks, payment systems and processing companies.
Merchant Inspector grew out of my years in banking anti-fraud and one simple conviction: merchant due diligence shouldn't stop once a merchant is approved for payment processing. I turned that approach into a product, and together with my team I keep building it so banks can see the risks behind online stores more clearly.
Challenge
When a bank provides payment processing services to online merchants, it is accountable not only for financial risk but also for what the merchant actually sells. Prohibited goods and services, a mismatch with the assigned merchant category code (MCC), websites blocked by Roskomnadzor (Russia's internet regulator) — each of these is a regulatory, reputational and fraud risk for the bank.
In practice, merchant websites are still reviewed by hand: slow, expensive and impossible to scale. On top of that, a merchant can pass onboarding with a "clean" website and swap the content later, and prohibited information is increasingly posted as images rather than text to slip past text filters.
Solution
Merchant Inspector automatically crawls the merchant's website, analyzes its content and surfaces the risk indicators it finds to the analyst — with detailed results and screenshots of every violation.
- Content checks — detects prohibited goods and services using keyword dictionaries and verifies that contact details, shipping and return policies are in place.
- Hidden content — recognizes text in images (OCR) and runs it against the same keyword dictionaries.
- MCC compliance — matches the declared business category against what the website actually offers.
- Domain and reputation — the Roskomnadzor registry, WHOIS and DNS, reputation services, and redirects to third-party resources.
- Monitoring — scheduled re-checks that catch changes at existing merchants.
- Investigation — automatic incident creation, case management, and linking check results to the merchant's transactions for risk scoring.
Results
Merchant Inspector turns manual merchant review into an automated process: the bank gets check results without crawling websites by hand, spots hidden violations that text filters miss, and continues monitoring merchants long after onboarding.
The product was presented at the Gazprombank Fintech Accelerator and placed among the winners.
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