# Business accounts overview

Business accounts enable clients to onboard businesses including both corporate entities and sole proprietors who wish to trade in their business capacity.

## Supported entities

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](https://upvest.co/contact) to learn more.

## Before you begin

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](/products/tol/guides/users/users_onboarding_roles). |


## Our solution for business accounts

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. |


### Entity mapping

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


## Regulatory checks for corporate entities

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.