Business Representative

API Reference

If you are using Mercoa’s payment rails, you will need to provide information about the business representatives associated with your customers’ business.

About business representatives

A business representative is someone with financial ownership or significant control over a business entity. In order to meet federal regulations, Mercoa is required to collect and verify information about these individuals. We have two categories for business representatives:

  • Controllers
  • Owners

If you’re providing information for a business representative, they must be either a controller or an owner (see below for more information). In some instances, the controller and owner can be the same person. If this is the case, set both isController and isOwner to true. We allow a maximum of 7 business representatives for a Mercoa account.

This only applies to entities set up as businesses. Entities that are set up as individuals will not have a business representative.

Controller

In compliance with regulatory guidelines, we require you to provide information for at least one verified business representative who exercises significant control over the company. Some examples of business representatives include the CEO, COO, Treasurer, President, Vice President, or Managing Partner.

Financial ownership

Additionally, we are required to verify all individuals with a ≥25% ownership stake of the company. Ownership information can be provided by creating a representative where isOwner = true and providing the ownershipPercentage. If the representative you’ve created does not own ≥25% of your company, you can indicate that by making sure isOwner = false and leaving the ownership percentage field blank.

Requirements

Below, we’ve consolidated the data requirements for owners and controllers.

Required informationOwnerController
Legal nameyesyes
Personal addressyesyes
Email or phone #yesyes
Date of birthyesyes
Full SSNyesyes
isControllernot requiredyes
Job titlenot requiredyes
isOwneryesnot required
Ownership percentageyesnot required