Offboarding
Offboarding is a bank or acquirer’s process for closing an existing account, typically triggered by a compliance review, a policy change on the client’s sector, or a ratio breach, rather than a specific fraud finding. Notice periods range from immediate freezes to 30-90 days, depending on the institution and jurisdiction.
An offboarding notice with a 30-day window sounds generous until you realize a same-industry replacement account often takes 4-8 weeks to open from scratch, leaving a gap where 100% of transaction volume has nowhere to land. Starting a backup relationship before offboarding happens, not after the notice arrives, is what closes that gap.
De-risking is a bank’s decision to exit or refuse entire categories of client, rather than assess each business individually, in order to avoid the compliance cost of monitoring them.
MATCH (Mastercard’s Member Alert to Control High-risk Merchants), often called the Terminated Merchant File or TMF, is a shared database acquirers check before onboarding a new merchant.
Underwriting is the risk-assessment process a bank, EMI, or acquirer runs on an applicant before approval: verifying ownership, source of funds, transaction history, and sector-specific risk factors against the institution’s published or internal risk appetite.
Correspondent banking is the arrangement where one bank holds accounts for and executes payments on behalf of another bank, usually to reach currencies or jurisdictions the first bank cannot access directly.