At Braintree, most new merchants are automatically approved to start processing without any human review. In some cases, an application will need an underwriter to take a look at it before it's fully approved. The advantage of this approach is that we won't tell you that you're good to go, but then shut you down a few weeks or months down the road after you've already started processing.
The UK process (at least when we investigated it) and I assume the rest of the recently added countries is still very much send us more paperwork then a bank ever will ask for to a black hole email (or sftp) at Braintree and say a pray.
This is no worse then any of the other payment processors in the UK but hardly the frictionless option that is in the US.
