Merchant Boarding

As an embedded payments partner, you can instantly board your merchants from your own software. You can also manage your merchants — everything from handling the initial validation process to maintaining a merchant’s account data after boarding.

This solution supports the following use cases:

• An independent software vendor (ISV) hosts a merchant-boarding application within their software and sends the request to us for streamlined, real-time boarding of merchants.
• A merchant application fails real-time identity validation, and the merchant submits documentation to have their application reviewed and account activated.

The following integration options are available for this solution:

• REST API
• SDKs (Java, PHP, or .NET)
• JavaScript

As a partner, you can embed the application for merchant boarding directly into your own software. This includes capturing all the necessary information about the merchant, submitting the boarding request, and receiving the merchant’s account information once they're approved.

Once you submit an application to board a new merchant, we will then:

• Create a merchant within our system and return a merchant ID (MER_ID) in real time.
• Perform real-time “know your customer” (KYC) validation (see next section).
• Provide the KYC results via a webhook notification.

Merchant Boarding Process

KYC validation

Once you’ve provided customer data through our Merchant Boarding API, we then perform an automated, real-time KYC validation. Although most of your merchants will be instantly enabled and can start accepting payments right away, you should expect a few to require additional validation, such as a government-issued photo ID (passport, driver’s license) and proof of current address (recent utility bill or bank statement)..

The most common reasons for a KYC decline include:

• The applicant or owner provided an invalid government reference ID (for example, social security number).
• The applicant or owner has a new address or provided a business address in place of their personal address.
• The applicant or owner submitted a nickname rather than their legal name.

Some important points about this process:

• If a merchant’s KYC validation fails, they will receive a WITH_MERCHANT status via webhook.
• Partners collect and upload the necessary documents via the Upload Merchant Documentation API to request additional validation (see our guide).
• Once approved, the merchant’s status updates to ACTIVE, and they can start processing payments.

Merchant account hierarchy

Before a partner can start boarding merchants, they need to be set up with the necessary permissions and capabilities. These are known as accounts and products in our system.

Accounts

Partners and merchants are set up for capabilities on our system via accounts, and they can only execute API actions based on the accounts configured for them. A successful request will result in an Account ID.

The required account a partner must be set up with:

• Merchant Management Account (MMA) – Necessary to grant a partner the capabilities to board, manage, and transact on behalf of merchants.

Other optional accounts a partner can be set up with:

• Funds Management (FMA) – Used to transfer funds between merchant accounts, or to move funds from a merchant account to a business bank account or debit card.
• Tokenization Management (TKA) – Used to tokenize payment methods. For example, to store a card or use Hosted Fields.
• Transaction Processing (TRA) – Used to create and manage transactions (that is, authorize, capture, reverse, and adjust) as well as activities that occur before or after transaction creation and management (for example, 3D Secure and card validations).

Products

Products represent the capabilities a partner can set up for a merchant using their MMA. If you plan to board a new merchant, you must specify one or more products in the request when creating a merchant so that the accounts needed by that merchant for the associated capability actions will be created.

The following tables show what products can be requested per region.

United States

United Kingdom

Canada

To try boarding a merchant, follow the steps in these guides.