To design a solution that suits your use case, start with learning about:
- Your Adyen account.
- The resources needed for payouts.
- How funds flow.
Your Adyen account
When you sign up for an Adyen account, you receive a company account and one or more merchant accounts. The merchant account is where you configure payment methods and processing currencies.
We refer to all your merchant accounts as your Adyen merchant accounts.
For more information about your Adyen account, refer to Adyen account structure.
Balance platform resources
Balance platform is where you create and onboard your legal entity, hold balances, and trigger payouts.
To onboard your business entity, you'll use the Legal Entity Management API and Configuration API. You will need to create the following resources:
- legalEntity: Represents your business entity, holds and links information required for verification checks. This resource also contains IDs of document and other legalEntity resources, if applicable. For organizations, the individuals connected to them must be represented as legal entities themselves and must be linked to the organization legal entity.
- document: Contains the document type and its contents. The owner of this resource must be a legalEntity resource.
- accountHolder: Represents your business as an account holder. The account holder must be linked to one legalEntity resource.
- balanceAccount: Holds the funds of an account holder. All financial activities, such as initiating payouts, happen through balance accounts. An account holder can have multiple balance accounts but in most use cases, one balance account is sufficient.
Example resources
The example below shows a user that:
- Is a company with one shareholder.
- Has two balance accounts to keep funds separately for accounting purposes.
- Has been required by Adyen to provide supporting documents for the organization and the shareholder.
The resources needed for this user are:
- Two legalEntity resources, one for the organization and one for the shareholder. The organization and the shareholder resources have a document resource.
- One accountHolder with two balanceAccount resources, representing two brands.
How funds flow
Your Adyen merchant account is connected to balance platform resources through the flow of funds.
For example, here's the process from receiving a payment to paying out:
- A customer buys goods or services. The payment is processed through your Adyen merchant account.
- You pull funds from your Adyen merchant account to a balance account.
- When you need to pay out to a beneficiary, the funds are taken from your balance account and sent to a third-party bank account.