Identity checks should be a ladder, not a wall

Every compliance team has met the same argument. The business says the form is costing them customers. Compliance says the form is what keeps the licence. Both are right, which is why the argument never ends.

Tiers end it.

The wall at the front door

A platform that demands full documentation before anyone can receive a single payment has made a choice, whether or not it realises it: it will not serve people who do not have that document today.

In the markets BitriPay operates in, that is not a small group. It is often the group digital money was supposed to reach — the trader, the rider, the person whose identity document is with a relative in another province.

They do not go without payments. They go back to cash.

The other wall

The opposite approach — ask for nothing — is not an option either, and not only because a regulator will eventually stop it. A platform with no idea who its customers are is a platform being used for things its founders would not choose.

A ladder instead

Tier 0 is a phone number. You can receive, within limits that are small enough to be proportionate to knowing almost nothing about you.

Tier 1 adds an identity document and the limits rise.

Tier 2 adds address and source of funds, and the limits rise again.

Nobody is turned away at the door. What somebody can do is proportionate to what is known about them, and they can change that in minutes whenever they choose.

Limits refuse, visibly

A transaction beyond a tier’s limit is refused, with a readable reason naming the tier — not silently held in a queue while the customer wonders.

Being told "this is above your tier’s limit; add a document to raise it" is a useful sentence. Being told nothing is how people conclude the app is broken.

Limits are configuration, not code. When a rule changes, the limits change, without waiting for a release.

Screening is daily, not once

Sanctions screening runs at onboarding and again every day against the official consolidated lists.

This matters more than it sounds. A customer who was clean when they joined and appears on a list eighteen months later is found by the daily rescreen. A platform that screens only at signup finds out when somebody else tells it.

Businesses

Business verification checks the registry, the beneficial owners above the declared threshold and the directors, and assigns a risk tier that gets reviewed rather than set once and forgotten.

Every decision is recorded with who made it, so the file can be read later by somebody who was not there — which is the actual test of a compliance file.

What it costs

Nothing. Higher tiers unlock higher limits, not better pricing.

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.

• Limits per tier and per corridor are configuration rather than code, so they move when a rule moves.
• A transaction beyond a tier’s limit is refused with a readable reason naming the tier, not silently held.
• Screening runs against official sanctions lists at onboarding and again daily, not once at signup.
• Business verification checks the registry, the beneficial owners above the declared threshold and the directors, and assigns a risk tier that is reviewed.
• Every verification decision is recorded with who made it, so the file can be read later without reconstructing it.

What it costs

Verification is free. Higher tiers unlock higher limits rather than cheaper pricing.

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: Identity and tiers on the features page.

Read next

• Risk and compliance — Refused before, not recalled after.
• E-money and safeguarding — Every balance is backed, by construction.
• Wallets and transfers — Money that arrives the moment it leaves.