What we need to verify your business

Because moving other people's money is regulated. Woosh works with Adyen, a licensed payments business, and any regulated payments business has to know who it is settling funds to before it settles them. That is anti-money-laundering law, not a Woosh policy, and no payments provider can waive it.

The practical version: it is a one-off, it is usually fifteen minutes, and it is the same set of questions your bank asked when you opened the business account.

Good instinct — check. The verification form is hosted by Adyen and carries Woosh branding, so the address bar will show an adyen.com domain, not ours. That is expected: your identity documents go to Adyen, not to Woosh.

What should make you stop: an email asking for documents as attachments, a link sent from a free email address, or anyone asking for card numbers or your banking password. We ask for none of those, ever. If a message looks off, don't click it — contact us and we will re-send the link ourselves.

Four roles, and one person often holds more than one — tick every role that applies to them rather than picking the closest.

• Signatory — the person completing this form and authorised to enter the agreement.
• Director — as recorded on the company register.
• Beneficial owner through ownership — anyone holding 25% or more of the business, directly or through another entity.
• Beneficial owner through control — anyone who effectively controls it without holding that share, such as a trustee or an appointor.

In a two-director business where both own half, that is two people, each ticked as director and as owner. A single-director company owned outright is one person with three ticks.

Nearly always one of five things. Adyen needs a photo of the physical document itself:

• A photo of a screen, a screenshot, or a photo of a printout. All rejected — it has to be the document in your hand.
• A corner or edge cropped off. All four corners visible.
• Greyscale or a black-and-white scan. Full colour.
• Only one side of a licence or identity card. Both sides are needed; a passport needs the photo page.
• An expired document.

Files: JPEG, JPG, PNG or PDF, one file per document. A PDF from 1 KB; an image from 100 KB; up to 15 MB either way. A straight-on photo in daylight on a plain table beats a scanner.

An account held in the name of the business being verified. The name on the account has to match the legal entity — not the trading name, and not a director personally, even for a sole-director company.

If a bank statement is requested, it needs the account holder's name, the account number or IBAN, a date of issue within the last twelve months, and something showing which bank issued it — a logo, the bank's name, or a BIC. JPEG, JPG, PNG or PDF up to 4 MB; a PDF straight from internet banking is the cleanest option.

That only happens when the automatic check against the register could not confirm the company name and number — usually because the name entered doesn't match the register exactly. Check the spelling first; it is often faster than finding the document.

If one is genuinely needed, it has to come from the official register and be either issued within the last twelve months, or signed and dated within the last twelve months. An ASIC company extract does the job.

All fine, and the form adapts. A sole trader is verified as the individual behind the ABN, so it is your own ID and a shorter form. A company is verified as the company, plus its directors and owners.

A trust needs the trustee identified as well, and the person who controls the trust ticked as a beneficial owner through control. If the structure has a company as its trustee, that company's directors come into it too — this is the case worth calling us about before you start rather than halfway through.

Most businesses clear automatically within minutes of submitting. Where a document has to be read by a person, it is normally a business day or two. You will hear from us either way; you do not need to sit and watch it.

You can keep setting up Woosh — menus, staff, locations, hardware — while it runs. What waits on verification is money: taking live card payments and having settlements paid out to your account. That is the part Adyen cannot switch on until the business is identified.

The verification link is deliberately short-lived — a few minutes from when it is generated — so an old one in your inbox will not open. That is a security measure, not a fault, and it does not mean anything you already submitted was lost.

Ask us for a fresh link and pick up where you stopped. Open it when you have the documents ready rather than to take a look.

Tell us and we will look it up. We can see the outstanding items on your account — which document, and the specific reason it came back — which is more use than guessing at a re-upload. Most rejections are a photo problem from the list above rather than anything about the business. Get in touch and we will read it out.

They are uploaded to Adyen and held by Adyen for the identity checks and for the record-keeping the law requires of them. They do not pass through Woosh: we see whether a check has passed, failed or is waiting, and which item is outstanding — not the files themselves. Our privacy statement covers what we do hold.