How a Global Payment Company Strengthens Merchant Credit Risk Monitoring with Owlin

The client

The client is a global payments company managing a large and diverse merchant portfolio. With exposure to insolvencies, adverse media, and fast-moving risk developments, the organization needed a more scalable way to monitor merchant credit risk across markets and segments.

The challenge

The client needed a better way to identify negative developments affecting merchants, especially insolvency risk, adverse media, and financial crime concerns. Manual Google searching was too time-consuming, difficult to scale, and created a high risk of missing relevant news and early warning signs.

The organization was looking for a solution that could:

• Monitor merchant credit risk and insolvency developments more proactively
• Automate adverse media monitoring at scale
• Reduce manual research time and effort
• Improve monitoring coverage across complex portfolios
• Deliver timely alerts that help teams act before losses occur

The client also wanted more consistent coverage and stronger signal quality to support ongoing monitoring across a broad and changing portfolio.

The solution

Owlin provided the client with an alerts-driven monitoring workflow for merchant credit risk and adverse media. Teams rely primarily on alerts, then use the Owlin Monitoring dashboard to review developments in more detail when needed.

With Owlin, the client was able to:

• Automate adverse media monitoring across its merchant portfolio
• Track insolvency risk and related negative developments more efficiently
• Identify financial crime risks in the portfolio
• Reduce reliance on manual Google searching
• Strengthen monitoring for higher-risk segments, including merchants with elevated chargeback exposure
• Review categorized news and supporting context in one place

Owlin helped the client move from manual monitoring toward a more proactive and scalable approach to risk detection.

The impact

By using Owlin, the client improved visibility into merchant risk events and strengthened its ability to respond to negative developments earlier.

Key outcomes include:

• Reduced manual effort for adverse media monitoring
• Better coverage across a large and complex merchant portfolio
• Earlier visibility into insolvency, credit risk, and financial crime signals
• More efficient alerts-led workflows for the credit risk team
• Stronger support for loss prevention through earlier action on material developments

In one case, Owlin surfaced an article early enough to help the team act in time and prevent a financial loss.