Merchant Onboarding

Merchant onboarding is what a payment facilitator, acquiring bank, payment gateway, or marketplace does before letting a business start taking payments through it: collecting business registration documents, a tax ID, beneficial-ownership (UBO) declarations, identity documents for the person signing on the business's behalf, and bank account details, then reviewing all of it, manually, through a KYB vendor, or some mix of both, before flipping the merchant's account live. It is, in substance, KYB (see that entry) performed at the specific moment a business signs up to process payments through a given rail, rather than at some other regulated relationship.

The practical pain in merchant onboarding is rarely that a business goes unchecked, it's that the check doesn't travel. A merchant selling through three different payment processors typically submits the same registration documents, the same tax ID, the same UBO declarations, and the same signatory ID three separate times, to three separate review queues, each with its own turnaround time. Every day of boarding delay is direct lost revenue for the merchant, since it can't take payments until the check clears, and manual UBO/sanctions review is inconsistent reviewer-to-reviewer and hard to reconstruct later if a regulator or auditor asks why a particular merchant was approved.

Who actually built this

The beneficial-ownership transparency rules underneath merchant onboarding trace to the same source as KYB generally: the Financial Action Task Force's Recommendations 24 and 25, implemented nationally through frameworks like the EU's Anti-Money Laundering Directives and (for U.S. entities) the Corporate Transparency Act. Layered on top of that, the card networks, Visa and Mastercard chief among them, impose their own merchant-registration and enhanced-due-diligence requirements for merchant category codes they classify as higher-risk, independent of what any national AML law requires. None of this is Solidus's design; regulators and card networks define what an adequate merchant-onboarding check looks like, not software vendors.

Solidus today

Solidus has not built a merchant-onboarding product. What exists is a specification: a set of proof types, company_exists, tax_id_valid, authorized_representative, risk_tier, that Solidus's own internal planning describes as buildable at its current L2 assurance ceiling, without any dependency on AML screening. sanctions_clear, the UBO sanctions-screening leg a real merchant-onboarding product would need, sits behind AML/sanctions-screening work that hasn't started (see AML). None of this has been wired to an actual payment facilitator, acquiring bank, or marketplace. PayTR, the only named Turkish target with a published merchant count (~200,000), is a cold prospect with no contact established. Moka United, iyzico, and Sipay appear in Solidus's own research as targets, not as customers, pilots, or design partners.

See also

KYB is the general business-verification check merchant onboarding specializes for the payments industry. Marketplace Seller Verification is the closely related check a marketplace platform runs on its own sub-merchants or sellers, which can overlap with merchant onboarding depending on who's the regulated party. AML and Sanctions Screening are the compliance layers a complete merchant-onboarding product would still need on top of entity verification alone. Trust Registry is the mechanism a future acquirer would use to decide whether to trust a reused merchant credential's issuer.