WooPayments: “Know Your Customer”

Because the payments sector is heavily regulated, we must gather certain information from you before you’ll be able to use WooPayments.

As you continue the process of signing up for WooPayments, we’ll ask for information about your business, including the business owner’s date of birth and tax ID number. We know you may wonder why we ask for this information, and how it will be used. The “Know Your Customer” process, explained below, helps us provide a safe, ethical environment for all financial transactions.

“Know Your Customer” standards are used by banks and other financial institutions to confirm that customers are who they say they are. By confirming their customers’ identities, banks and financial institutions can help keep transactions safe from fraud and other suspicious activities.

Before we build a payment relationship with a customer, we ask for the information listed above to validate the business owner’s identity and tax ID number, and to ensure that we can connect the listed bank account with the business itself.

The ultimate goal of the “Know Your Customer” process is to help your business get up and running with payments as soon as possible while protecting your business and your customers. We follow the same regulations as other financial institutions so that we can ensure we operate in an ethical and trustworthy manner. We want to protect your business and the payments that we manage for you. The “Know Your Customer” process helps us protect you.

As of WooPayments version 6.0.0 and later, some merchants may be selected for an experimental KYC process known as gradual signup. If you are one of these merchants, we will prefill the Stripe-hosted signup form with the same answers you entered into signup form on your own site. This avoids you having to re-enter the same information twice.

Unfortunately there is no way to completely skip the Stripe-hosted signup form.

If you’re setting up WooPayments for someone else, it’s best to have that person complete the account creation process. As you can see above, we ask for very specific information about the business owner – and you might not have all the details at hand. It’s not always possible to change account information once it’s been saved, especially if the site accepts live transactions before the correct account information is entered.

We take every step required to safeguard your personal data. WooPayments is built in partnership with Stripe to store your data in a safe and secure manner.

We’ll do our best to work with Stripe to confirm your identity as quickly as we can. Typically, we’ll confirm your application within a couple of days.

Here’s a brief list of the information you’ll need to finish payment signup:

Business owner information

• Legal name
• Date of birth
• Home address
• Email address
• Mobile phone number
• Bank account information
• Social Security number (SSN) or Taxpayer Identification Number

Business information

• Country where your business is based
• Type of business
• Industry
• Company address
• Company phone number
• Company URL
• EIN or other tax ID

Most of the KYC information can be changed via the Stripe dashboard.