Rainforest requires your merchants be onboarded before they can collect payments. The merchant onboarding process at Rainforest is designed to quickly collect accurate data from your customers to complete required account verification and comply with rules and regulations prior to accepting payments.

In the Rainforest ecosystem has two entities, Merchant and Merchant Applications, to represent your merchant and their status within Rainforest.

• A merchant is a business that your platform will enable to take payments. It represents a single legal entity, such as an LLC with a specific tax ID number.
• A merchant application represents information about the business that goes through the underwriting process by Rainforest. A merchant's information might change over time, such as phone number, address, or bank account, and changes would be approved through a new merchant application.

Merchant onboarding

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A merchant can be onboarded in three ways:

• The Merchant Onboarding Component embedded in your platform (recommended)
• The Rainforest API
• Manually entered by your support staff in the Rainforest Platform Portal

Onboarding process

The onboarding process consists of 3 phases:

1. Merchant creation and application submission: the merchant is created, the required information is collected in the merchant application, and the application is submitted for approval.
2. Account verification: the information provided is reviewed to ensure compliance with any application rules and regulations, Rainforest policy, and for accuracy.
3. Decisioning: The merchant application is either declined or approved.

Application requirements

A merchant will be in the status of Pending and the application in the status of Created. The application will move to In Progress when the merchant begins entering their information into the application, indicating they've started the process.

Some of the information collected ensures Rainforest has the information legally-required for the "Know Your Customer" (KYC) or "Know Your Business" (KYB) processes to identify and verify the entity of your merchants in order to prevent financial crimes such as money laundering and terrorism financing. Other information is for underwriting or operational purposes, or for populating the Payment Descriptor to your merchant's users.

Data collected during the onboarding process can vary slightly by business type. See the following table for all data that must be set in order to submit the merchant application for approval.

• ✅: required field
• ❌: field cannot be set
• ✚: optional field

Owner/Representative data

LLC, LLP, and Partnership organizations can have up to 4 owners with greater than 25% ownership. Private corporation, public corporation, Non-profit organization, and Government require 1 representative. Individual only has 1 owner with 100% ownership.

Account verification

Once the merchant submits their application, the application status will move to Processing. Rainforest will review the application and determine next steps.

Most often, the information provided in the merchant application is sufficient to complete the underwriting process. Once approved, the application will move to Completed and the merchant will move to Active. The merchant is now ready to accept payments.

Additional verification

However, there may be scenarios where additional verification is required to make a decision on your merchant. These reasons may include data mismatch (e.g. the business legal name is not associated to the tax ID provided), business entity verification (i.e. we were unable to confirm that the business is a registered entity), or for an enhanced verification (e.g. the business volume or business type warrants additional review).

If additional verification is required, the merchant will enter one of the two statuses:

• Needs Information: you or your merchant can resolve the open issues through the self-service verification process using the Merchant Onboarding Component.
• In Review: we need additional information from you or your merchant that cannot be resolved through the self-service verification process. Rainforest will reach out to you, the platform, via the provided underwriting email we have on file.

Once Rainforest has the additional information, we will make a decision on your merchant.

Auto-cancelation of merchants

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Open applications of 120 days

Rainforest will automatically cancel merchants that are in the status of Pending or Onboarding for more than 120 days, based on the created date of the merchant.

The result of this process will move the merchant to the Canceled status and the associated open application to the Declined status.

You should listen to the merchant and merchant application webhooks to know when Rainforest automatically closes an application. The following webhooks will trigger:

• merchant.canceled
• merchant_application.declined

Once the application is closed, it will no longer appear in the Merchant report in the Platform Portal.

The platform can create a new merchant if the merchant would like to re-apply for payment processing. Because the previous application was closed and no longer appears in the Platform Portal, you will be able to use the merchant name again when creating a new merchant.

Statuses

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Merchant statuses

The merchant status is the descriptor of the current status in the life cycle of a merchant. Indicating if they are onboarded, can accept payments, and receive deposits.

Merchant application statuses

The merchant application status is the descriptor of the current status in the life cycle of a merchant application. Indicating the status of the merchant application through the onboarding and underwriting process.