Onboard Merchants

Onboard Merchants with Custom Components

A Legal Entity API object represents a single person (in the case of sole proprietors), business, or a non-profit. They store the personal and business verification information (Know Your Customer) that we use to underwrite and protect your users against fraud.

Create a Legal Entity with Custom Components

{
  "country": "US"
}

WePay.tokens.create({
  "resource": "legal_entities",
    "legal_entities": {
      "controller": {
        "email": "test1@test.com",
        "name": {
          "first": "foo",
          "middle": "t",
          "last": "bar"
          },
        "is_beneficial_owner": true,
        "email_is_verified": true
		},
	  "terms_of_service": {
	    "acceptance_time": 1551980186,   // Send real merchant TOS acceptance time
	    "original_ip": "8.8.8.8"          // Send real merchant original IP
		}
	  }
})

If you are onboarding a Government Entity or a Publicly Traded Company (including subsidiaries), then your request will look like this:

WePay.tokens.create({
  "resource": "legal_entities",
    "legal_entities": {
      "account_controller": {
        "email": "test1@test.com",
        "name": {
          "first": "foo",
          "middle": "t",
          "last": "bar"
          },
        "email_is_verified": true
		},
	  "terms_of_service": {
	    "acceptance_time": 1551980186,   // Send real merchant TOS acceptance time
	    "original_ip": "8.8.8.8"          // Send real merchant original IP
		}
	  }
})

The response for any successful Legal Entities token create call will contain a Legal Entity token which looks like this:

{
    "token": {
        "id": "legal_entities-660420e3-ad2b-4ebe-914c-4a7b55d01dd4"
    }
}

Tokens have a time-to-live (TTL) of 30 minutes, so the API request must be made in that timeframe in order to successfully add the tokenized information.

Define Beneficial Owner

For all merchants except Government Entities and Publicly Traded Companies (including subsidiaries), the controller must be defined, regardless of if they are a beneficial owner. A controller is an individual with significant responsibility to control or manage the Legal Entity (VP type role, or above, so you can use C-Suite roles and founders). A beneficial owner is someone who owns 25% or more of the organization.

1. If a controller IS a beneficial owner, then you can have, at max, 3 other Additional Representatives.
2. If a controller IS NOT a beneficial owner, then you can have, at max, 4 Additional Representatives.
3. If a controller IS NOT a beneficial owner, it's not guaranteed that you will use any and all additional representatives, because an additional representative must have greater than or equal to 25% of the business.

In addition to collecting beneficial owner information, any change made to the controller or beneficial owners' (additional representatives) personal details requires attestation from the Controller, as shown below.

By clicking "Submit," you hereby certify, to the best of your knowledge, that the information provided above is complete and correct.

Create an Account with Custom Components

This step creates a merchant Account in our system, not a merchant account with a bank. Logically, a Legal Entity is the parent of the Account and can own multiple Accounts, while an Account can have at most one Legal Entity.

Once you have a Legal Entity, you'll need an Account to begin processing payments. An Account is an approximate representation of what your platform would consider a merchant account, containing specific information about the shop/business/person directly processing payments, and the Account ID will be the API owner of Payments and other transactions. Accounts will not contain any sensitive information requiring tokenization.

{
  "legal_entity_id": "98e4134b-b148-41ad-8079-71232a773d70",
  "name": "Fo",
  "description": "This is Foo's location on B street",
  "industry": {
    "merchant_category_code": "7333"
  },
  "statement_description": "Foo Shop"
}