How to Automate IRIS CRM

The merchant list is the whole asset an ISO owns

IRIS CRM is the platform independent sales organisations, agent offices and banks run their payments business on. Since NMI acquired IRIS it has been rebranded Merchant Central, and plenty of the people in it every day still call it IRIS.

What sits inside is a portfolio. Every merchant an agent ever signed, with the application that started them, the underwriting notes behind the approval, the merchant ID the processor issued, the terminal on the counter, the support tickets, and the split that decides who gets paid what on that account each month.

That makes it unlike a sales CRM, where a record goes quiet once the deal closes. A boarded merchant keeps producing. It runs volume every day, generates residual income every month, occasionally attracts a chargeback, and one day leaves without saying so. The record is a live account, not a closed opportunity, and an office of twenty agents may be carrying several thousand at once.

Residual season arrives one processor portal at a time

The reliable rhythm of an agent office is the residual month. Somewhere in the middle of it the processors publish what they paid, and somebody starts collecting.

Each one publishes differently. One posts a spreadsheet in its partner portal. Another emails a file. A third shows the figures on screen with no export worth using. They land on different days of the month, in different layouts, and the office pulls them down, gets them comparable, and works out what every agent is owed.

Then the exceptions. A merchant that produced nothing this month, which means a closed account or one now processing with a competitor. A residual line that halved with no note against it. A non-compliance fee charged to a merchant who will ring about it on Monday. A chargeback sitting in a dispute portal with a response deadline nobody wrote down.

None of it is hard. All of it is a person signing into another company's website, reading a number, and typing it somewhere else.

IRIS CRM

Residuals collected the day they publish Each processor's monthly report pulled down, made comparable and checked against the agent splits already on file, with the disagreements named.

Attrition caught in the volume Every merchant's processing read against its own recent months, so a shop on the way out is a call rather than a surprise in the next file.

Disputes ranked by what is left Open chargebacks read from the processor's portal and sorted by days remaining to respond, because that clock is the part nobody can put back.

Boarding reaches the processor, the portals stay shut

The platform is strong on the part it owns, and an office that has not configured all of it is leaving easy hours on the table.

Pipeline Management carries the deal from first contact to signature. Sign-Up and Onboarding, with merchant boarding behind it, pushes an approved application into the processor rather than making somebody rekey it. Residuals Management takes the processor's reporting and turns it into agent splits, so commission is not a spreadsheet one person quietly maintains. Merchant Underwriting brings the risk work into the same file, with ScanX checking a new application and MonitorX watching it after it goes live.

Every one of those runs on something the platform was handed: an application somebody entered, a file a processor delivered.

The rest of the day happens on sites it never signs into. The processor's partner portal, where this month's report and the fee detail live. The dispute portal, where a chargeback has a clock on it. The compliance vendor's site, where a merchant's certification lapsed in June. The equipment supplier's order page. Each has its own login, and each is currently a person.

A merchant leaves quietly, and the volume says so first

A portfolio can report on itself. It needs nothing the office does not already have except somebody to open those portals on the same day each month.

Every merchant's monthly volume read from the processor and set against the three months before it, so a shop that has dropped seventy per cent is a phone call this week, not a cancelled account discovered in the next residual file. Residual reports gathered from each processor the day they publish, turned into one comparable list, and checked against what the platform shows per agent, with the lines that disagree named. Open chargebacks pulled from the dispute portal and sorted by days left to respond, because the deadline is the only part of a dispute that cannot be recovered.

Then the slow work that never quite gets done. Certification dates checked across the whole book, so a merchant about to be charged a compliance fee hears from their agent before the statement. Equipment orders followed to a delivery date without anyone phoning the supplier. A prospect's current processing statement set line by line against your own pricing, so a rep walks in with the comparison already made.

None of that calls for judgement. It calls for a login and a tolerance for tedium.

Nobody joined an ISO to download residual reports

The rep who was hired to sell opens the partner portal on the fifteenth and starts collecting.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the processor's portal, the dispute site, the compliance vendor or the supplier, reads what is on the screen, and writes the result onto the merchant's record in IRIS CRM where the agent on that account will see it.

It does not reprice a merchant, respond to a chargeback or pay out a residual. Anything reaching a merchant or an agent is drafted and waits for a person to send it.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the systems it opens.