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balanced / balanced-api

Balanced API specification.
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What is the merchant_status field on customers for? #512

Open mjallday opened 10 years ago

mjallday commented 10 years ago

Prompted by a conversion on IRC.

https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/blob/revision1/fixtures/_models/customer.json#L83

What is this field for? I originally thought Balanced required underwriting in some situations.

mjallday commented 10 years ago

ping @steveklabnik @remear @rserna2010 @rmanisha

We should clarify in the API docs and also update any outdated literature such as the KB article linked above.

steveklabnik commented 10 years ago

It's because customers represent both buyers and sellers.

mjallday commented 10 years ago

Sure, but when is that relevant to me?

It would be nice if the current API docs had a section that went into detail about it e.g.:

You need to underwrite a customer if the total payouts to unverified identities in a given year exceeds $100,000 (this is per our agreement with our processor)

To clarify, if:

  1. Person A was paid 50K in one year
  2. Person B was paid 30K in one year
  3. Person C was paid 110K in one year

If, from the above, only Person C was a verified identity, then you are still compliant, since the total payouts for both the unverified users A and B is < 100K.

steveklabnik commented 10 years ago

Sure, we should be more explicit, I was just stating the answer.