Business accounts enable clients to onboard businesses including both corporate entities and sole proprietors who wish to trade in their business capacity.
Upvest supports business accounts for the following types of entities:
- Corporate entities of different legal types including private limited companies, partnerships, and trusts.
- Sole proprietors, sole traders, and freelancers who trade in their capacity as a business.
Business accounts are only available for sole proprietors, sole traders, and freelancers when trading with business funds. If trading with private funds, they should be onboarded as regular end users.
Each type of entity has a slightly different onboarding procedure that is described in the following sections.
If you are a financial institution looking to leverage the Upvest infrastructure, please reach out to us to learn more.
Before starting, we want to explain the following terms and phrases related to business accounts.
| Key Terms | Description |
|---|---|
| Business Entity | A corporate entity or sole proprietorship registered via the /businesses endpoint. Identified throughout the API by its business_id, which replaces the user_id used in personal account flows. |
| KYB (Know Your Business) check | A mandatory regulatory check for corporate entities requiring key documents to be submitted via the POST /businesses/{business_id}/checks endpoint before an account group can be activated. Note: This check is not required for sole proprietors. |
| Business Self-Assessment | A check capturing financial and operational details about a business including industry, countries of activity, and revenue ranges. |
| Legal Entity Identifier | The unique identifier that identifies distinct legal entities participating in global financial transactions. This is required for MiFID II reporting. |
| User Identifier | The national identifier for individual users. |
| Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) | Any individual who owns or controls more than 25% of the business. At least one UBO must be assigned and fully verified before a corporate business account group can be activated. Details on additional roles within a business are provided in the Roles guide. |
Upvest makes it easy for you to offer business accounts to your end users. We provide the following endpoints to help provide all required functionality to support configuring and managing business accounts:
| Functionality | Related Endpoint |
|---|---|
| Ability to create and onboard a business entity | The /businesses endpoint allows you to create a new business entity, retrieve business entities, and offboard a business. |
| Ability to change and existing business entity | The /businesses/{business_id}/data_change_requests endpoint allows you to change business data like the email addresses |
| Assigning different user roles that are part of a business | The /roles endpoint allows you to assign users to specific roles within a business. |
| Support for regulatory checks when onboarding a business. | You can use the /businesses/{business_id}/checks endpoint to share confirmation and link to documents for the Know your business (KYB) check. |
| Monitor the business creation and business checks processes | The Business events webhook allows you to monitor the business onboarding, data changes, and offboarding processes. The Business checks events webhook provides updates during the business check process. |
For personal accounts, all functionality maps to the individual user. Business accounts map the following areas directly to the business entity.
In all the below API entities, the business_id is used instead of the user_id.
- Acceptance of Terms and conditions / Privacy Agreement
- Accounts and account groups
- Direct debits
- Withdrawals
- Cash balance
- (FTR) Cash transactions
- Reference bank account
- Direct debit mandate
- Reports
- Orders
- Liquidations
When onboarding a corporate entity you must complete a Know-Your-Business (KYB) and a self-assessment check. The KYB check requires clients to upload verification files related to their end users' businesses while the self-assessment aids in risk assessment.
For corporate entities, individual users cannot accept the Terms and Conditions nor the Data Privacy and Sharing Agreement for a business account. These items should be skipped in the user onboarding process when solely opening a business account.
Users that are also opening personal investing accounts must accept both agreements.