Merchant KYC, in minutes.

It depends on the activity and the bank-sponsorship model. A pure ISO acting under an acquiring bank's BIN typically does not register, because the acquirer holds the licensing perimeter. A money transmitter (P2P, cross-border, payouts to consumers) almost always must register as a Money Services Business with FinCEN within 180 days of starting and renew every two years, plus obtain state money-transmitter licenses. PayFacs sit in the middle and the answer is fact-specific. Legal Talent's KYC and KYB modules satisfy either path.

Visa and Mastercard both require acquirers and PayFacs to verify the legal entity, the control person and the ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) of every merchant, screen them against sanctions and PEPs, validate the business model against the prohibited and high-brand-risk categories, and re-onboard on events such as ownership change. The Mastercard MATCH list and Visa Merchant Screening Service must also be checked. Legal Talent runs all of those in a single onboarding session with a normalized scorecard.

ODFIs and Third-Party Senders must perform due diligence on every Originator before enabling ACH origination, including verifying identity, evaluating creditworthiness and assessing the business model. NACHA's Risk Management Framework expects ongoing monitoring of return rates, especially R03, R07 and R10, and prompt offboarding of bad actors. Legal Talent's KYB output feeds directly into ACH origination decisioning and our continuous-monitoring engine flags merchants whose risk profile shifts after onboarding.

Our screening API surfaces sanctions and PEP exposure at the customer and counterparty level, and our adverse-media engine classifies financial-crime news in real time. We integrate with your TM platform via webhooks: when a screening result changes (new designation, new adverse hit, watchlist update), the affected customer's risk score is refreshed and downstream rules can re-trigger. We do not replace a full transaction-monitoring platform, but we enrich it with examiner-grade KYC and screening signals.

At minimum: OFAC SDN, OFAC Consolidated and OFAC sectoral programs. International acquiring also requires the UN, EU and UK HMT lists, plus the local list of every market the merchant accepts payments in. Card schemes additionally require checking Mastercard MATCH and Visa Merchant Screening Service before boarding. Legal Talent screens against all of those and keeps a per-merchant audit trail showing exactly which lists were checked, which version was hit and who reviewed each match.