SeQura has cut its merchant vetting time from four hours to under 15 minutes by overhauling its know your business process with Duna’s automation software, enabling faster growth across southern Europe.
SeQura has sharply cut the time it takes to vet merchants for buy now, pay later services after overhauling its know your business checks with Duna’s compliance software, easing a process that had become a brake on growth. According to Duna, the Spanish payments company now reviews cases in an average of 14.9 minutes, down from about four hours before the new system was introduced, while approving 95.2% of submissions and lifting its first-time-right onboarding rate to 88%.
The change matters because SeQura serves more than 4,000 merchant stores and 1.5 million buyers across southern Europe, and its onboarding process had grown increasingly cumbersome as the business expanded. Duna said SeQura was previously using a form-based tool that collected information but did not validate it, leaving analysts to move between several systems and handle some checks manually. For more complex merchant structures, that meant verifying company documents, directors and beneficial owners one step at a time, often turning a routine review into most of a working afternoon.
Fuen Hidalgo, SeQura’s head of onboarding, told Duna that the team had to switch repeatedly between tools to verify documents and run screening checks. The company’s compliance lead, Daniel Zipse, now sets the criteria for low-, medium- and high-risk merchants, along with the documents needed for different legal forms and the triggers for enhanced due diligence, while Duna applies those rules automatically to each incoming case. That shift has helped SeQura move away from a model in which growth depended on adding more staff.
The impact became clearer in early 2025, when SeQura reboarded 1,700 active merchants for mandatory periodic reviews without interrupting its normal workflow. Duna said the old system would have required nearly 7,000 analyst hours, whereas the new process took about 420 hours. The company also said pre-filling registry data and showing only relevant fields for each merchant improved the experience for applicants, while pushing adverse media, politically exposed person, identity and watchlist checks to the front of the process freed analysts to focus on the more complex cases.
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