Take payments for your customers without becoming a payment business

There is a moment in every successful platform's life where it starts collecting money on behalf of its customers, and discovers that it has accidentally become a payment business.

The two usual escapes are both bad. Pool everything through your own account and you are holding other people's money without a licence. Send every customer off to sign up with a processor themselves and you lose half of them at a form you do not control.

A third option

Create the account by API. One call, with their business name, type and country, and the customer has a real merchant account — their own wallets, their own settlement profile, their own statements and their own verification record.

Then take payments for them with your key, by adding one header. Everything your key may do for you, it does for that account. Your scopes still apply.

They are the merchant of record

This is the part that makes it legally sane rather than merely convenient.

The money lands in their wallet. It settles by their settlement profile, to their instructions. Their statements are theirs. BitriPay holds the authorisation and remains the regulated party; you are an integrator, not a custodian.

You never hold their money, so there is never a day when a regulator asks why you are holding it.

Your fee is visible

Set a default fee in basis points on the account, or a fixed amount per payment. It is taken at capture as a transparent split and appears on both statements — yours and theirs.

That visibility is deliberate. A platform fee netted invisibly out of a customer's settlement is the kind of arrangement that feels clever until the customer works it out. One that appears as a line both parties can read survives the conversation.

Hand-over is built in, not negotiated

Send the customer a one-time claim link whenever they should own the account themselves. They set a password, sign in, and see you under Team as an administrator.

And then — this is the important bit — they can remove you. At any time, without asking you, without a support ticket. Their keys, wallets and history stay theirs.

That sounds like a feature against your interests. It is the opposite. A customer who knows they can leave without losing anything is a customer who does not spend the relationship planning their escape.

Their events reach you

Payments on a Connected accounts for platforms" data-autolink="1">connected account raise webhooks to your endpoints carrying the account id, so your system knows whose payment it was without asking.

What it costs

Nothing to create accounts or hold them. Payments carry the ordinary rate. Your platform fee is yours.

What you can check

These are facts about the running platform, not adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, in the API reference or in the ledger.

• The customer is the merchant of record: their money lands in their wallet and settles by their settlement profile.
• Your fee is a split on the payment, paid at capture, visible on both sides rather than netted invisibly.
• Any operation your key may perform for you, it performs for a connected account with one header; scopes still apply.
• When the customer claims the account they see you under Team as an administrator, and they can remove you at any time. Keys, wallets and history stay theirs.

What it costs

No charge for creating or holding accounts. Payments carry the ordinary rate, and your platform fee is yours.

Is it switched on?

Whether this is available depends on the authorisations in place and on what the administrator of a given deployment has switched on. That changes, and an article does not — so the live answer lives on the feature page, which reads it from the platform itself: Connected accounts on the features page.

Read next

• The gateway API — Three calls and a webhook.
• Signed webhooks — Your software finds out before your customer does.
• Team and roles — Delegate the counter, not the business.