I finally figured it out, when you create a tenant per installation instructions, the pipeline batches in your new tenant are still referring to branch specific pipeline steps and not newly created ones. So, even if you corrected end points on newly created pipeline steps to point to fully configured/tested endpoints, the pipeline batches will still continue to use incorrect end point configuration and hence will fail.
To fix this go through all pipeline batches and pipeline steps(especially the iterative pipeline steps) to ensure they are pointing to newly created tenant based pipeline steps and not branch ones.
I could find this is the issue by swapping to raw view. :)