As required by payment industry regulations, Adyen must verify the users in your marketplace before you can process payments, pay out their funds, and offer financial products to them. These verification checks are also called Know Your Customer (KYC) checks.
During this process, Adyen verifies that your users provide accurate information about their businesses. Based on the results of the verification checks, Adyen decides if a user can perform any action on your marketplace. These actions are known as capabilities .
To see whether a user can use a specific capability on your marketplace, check the capability settings.
On this page, we describe:
When does Adyen verify users
Adyen verifies users before allowing them to use capabilities on your marketplace. The following events all trigger verification checks.
Requesting capabilities for your user
In the design phase, you set the default capabilities for your marketplace. These capabilities are requested every time you onboard a new user and create an account holder for them. Adyen verifies the user and if they successfully complete the verification checks, they are allowed to use the capabilities.
If a user needs a specific capability that is not requested by default, you must request the additional capability. In some cases, this requires more verification.
When users change their data
When users change their data after they are already allowed to use capabilities, Adyen verifies them again.
If the updated data fails verification checks, Adyen may set a verification deadline by which the user needs to resolve the issues. The user is allowed to continue using the capabilities while the verification deadline is active.
If the user does not resolve the verification issues in a timely manner, their capabilities will be disallowed.
Note that balancePlatform.accountHolder.updated are only triggered for capability-related changes to the account holder. Data changes to the legal entity of the account holder do not trigger webhooks.
When users move to a higher tier (staggered verification)
In a staggered verification, you collect data from the user based on their tier. When a user moves to a higher tier, the capabilities related to paying out are disallowed. For the capabilities related to accepting payments, in the future Adyen might add a deadline by which the user must provide additional required data. They would be allowed to use capabilities related to accepting payments while the deadline is in place.
If the user does not take action in a timely manner, the remaining capabilities will be disallowed.
Periodic data reviews required by Adyen
Adyen occasionally requires your users to review and confirm that their data is up-to-date. You also can choose to proactively request the data review for your user.
After a data review is triggered, Adyen immediately runs verification checks on the existing data of the user. This data includes information about their legal entity/legal arrangement and all entities associated with it, such as their ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) and signatories.
Adyen sets a verification deadline by which the user must confirm their data and update it (if needed). If there are no verification errors, the user must only review and confirm their data. If there are any errors from the verification checks, the user must also resolve them and confirm the data. If you proactively request the data review, Adyen still provides a verification deadline during which the user can continue using their capabilities that were allowed.
If the user updates their data, Adyen verifies the updated data again. While the deadline is active, the user can continue using their capabilities that were allowed prior to the review request. If the user does not confirm the data and resolve any verification errors, their capabilities will be disallowed. The review is only considered finalized when the user has both confirmed the data and resolved all verification errors.
Verification deadlines
Verification deadlines are only available in v3 and v4 of the Legal Entity Management API.
For the events described above that trigger additional verification checks, Adyen may set a deadline to give the user enough time to resolve verification issues.
Users are allowed to continue using the capabilities while the deadline is active. To see the verification deadlines, you can either:
- View the details of the account holder in your Customer Area.
- Make a GET /accountHolders/id request.
The diagrams in the next section show the process and the corresponding capability verification statuses and capability settings.
How the verification process works
In the following diagrams, you can see the process for events that trigger verification checks and the relationship between capability verification statuses and capability settings.