Onboard and verify your users

Your users' legal entity type and operating country determine the required verification information you need to collect from your users. You can use Adyen's Hosted onboarding or build your own UI to collect information from your users. After Adyen receives the information, the verification process starts automatically.

Types of onboarding

Types of verification

A staggered verification approach is applied to your account holders by default. You can enable upfront verification using version 3 of the Legal Entity Management API.
To enable upfront verification for an account holder, make a POST /legalEntities or PATCH /legalEntities/{id} request, and set the verificationPlan parameter to upfront.

Onboarding versioning

We regularly make non-breaking changes to the Legal Entity Management API in order to provide you benefits from the updates, but at the same time not require you to reintegrate with Adyen. Any changes to the LEM API are described in our release notes. Forward compatibility is not currently supported. For example, a legal entity created in LEM API v3 cannot be updated using LEM API v2.

We sometimes need to introduce breaking changes due to regulatory changes or provide new features to our merchants. When we introduce a breaking change, we will do this in a new version of the LEM API. If there are critical required security or compliance changes, these will implemented in the latest API version and released in test environments four weeks before they are available in live. You will also receive updates about these changes in your Balance Platform Customer Area.

Breaking changes are introduced in order to:

• Provide new onboarding features
• Improve your onboarding performance and stability
• Ensure compliance with new regulatory requirements

API release schedule

We aim to release new stable versions of the Legal Entity Management API and Hosted onboarding on a consistent basis. We recommend you upgrade to the latest API version as soon as possible. Although older versions can still be used, they will not receive any additional updates.

Before we release a new stable version of the LEM API, we will offer a preview API-only release candidate version. Note that this version will not offer hosted onboarding support.

The release candidate version will be subject to change based on feedback received from our merchants who are willing to pilot. The new release candidate API versions provide early access to new features and improvements planned for the latest stable version.

Sunsetting API versions and upgrading to new versions

We aim to provide you with the ability to stay compliant with changing regulations. As part of our API lifecycle management, we may sometimes sunset older versions of the Legal Entity Management API. This means that after the specified sunset date, you can no longer use that version of the API. We understand that integrating with new API versions takes time, and hence, we aim to provide adequate sunset time from the launch of the new API version.

If you use hosted onboarding, remaining compliant requires no additional effort on your part.

If you use API-only onboarding, you will need to upgrade to the latest API version before the sunset date of the version that you are using.

How to onboard your users

Your users' legal entity type and operating country determine the minimum required verification information you need to collect.