While I feel technology is extremely important I strongly disagree with cashguy's statement...u can not let an algorithm decide which merchants are approved and which merchants are not...sure you can use automation for a system generated pre-approval... But once you take the human touch, common sense up and down decision making away from an actual underwriter and out it in the hands of a computer or system default rates will skyrocket. A computer can't decide if a merchant sounds shady on the merchant interview. A computer can't tell if a merchant got his cousin to do the landlord verification...