Account Holder
Money can't be stored at Swan without belonging to "someone". This "someone" is the account holder.
Account holder is the term Swan uses to designate the owner of one or several accounts at Swan. Money stored in an account belongs to the account holder.
An account holder can be one of your customers, whether an actual human being ("natural person") or a legal entity such as a company or an association ("legal person"). Even you can be an account holder.
Account holders, created on-demand, are able to use their accounts immediately, with some restrictions. Until identity verification has been completed, the account holder is limited to €150 of outgoing payments over a 30 day period and will not be assigned an IBAN.
To fight money laundering and terrorist financing, banking regulations require that financial establishments such as Swan keep track of and verify their clients. In banking jargon, we talk about KYC (Know Your Customer). To handle KYC, Swan has set up a fluid and pleasant white-label identity verification for account holders.
A person can open an account for themselves as a "natural person," or they can open an account on behalf of a "legal person," like their company. In either case, Swan makes sure that the person opening the account actually is who they say they are.
To do this, Swan provides a streamlined and ultra-strong verification process through web responsive onboarding interfaces that can easily be integrated into your product.
Verification steps
Here's how it works: the person opening the account takes a selfie, presents at least one identification document, and Swan compares the two. The combination of identity documentation and biometric face recognition makes for an ultra-strong KYC and it is called Identity verification. Once that step done, we can issue instantly IBAN related to this account. Learn more here about requirements for verifying an account holder for each account country.
If the account is being opened for a legal person, they will likely be asked to provide additional documents related to the legal person's identity. Learn more here.
Swan is proud to make your job easier with this ultra-strong KYC, but if it's a blocking point for you and you feel it is absolutely vital to collect your account holders' data and identification yourself, don't hesitate to contact us: [email protected].
Once an account holder is verified, their account's
paymentLevel goes from Limited to Unlimited. The €150 limit on outgoing payments over a period of 30 days is lifted, and they can obtain an IBAN.To help you keep track of the verification process of an account holder at Swan, we provide the
verificationStatus field with the following values:NotStarted: when the verification process has not yet begunWaitingForInformation: when Swan is waiting on information from the account holderPending: when Swan has begun reviewing the information provided by the account holderVerified: when Swan has successfully completed the verification process
To start the verification process of the account holder, the user that finalizes the onboarding must verify their identity. Based on the country of the account and its requirements, Swan offers in the API some recommendations for the identification level:
account.legalRepresentativeMembership.recommendedIdentificationLevel: Refers to the identification level that is recommendedaccount.legalRepresentativeMembership.acceptedIdentificationLevels: Refers to the identification levels that are accepted
Example: For an individual French account:
account.legalRepresentativeMembership.recommendedIdentificationLevel=Expertaccount.legalRepresentativeMembership.acceptedIdentificationLevels=Expert,QES,PVID
Once the legal representative has verified their identity, Swan will help you to check if he has the minimum required identification level to continue the verification process using the boolean
account.legalRepresentativeMembership.hasRequiredIdentificationLevel 
During the document collection phase, we will check all the documents you send during the onboarding. If we need other documents, we will send a white-label email to the end-user (or to an email you provided during the setup of your project), asking for more documents. If not, we will directly go into the compliance review.
During the compliance review, our compliance department will approve or not the account created.
Once approval is given, the account is verified.
Last modified 1mo ago