Onboard a Business

What is a Business?

A Business in the GrailPay Payments API represents a business entity who can send or receive ACH transfers. Each business is uniquely identified by a uuid associated with the user, which is returned upon successful onboarding and is required for future operations such as linking bank accounts and initiating transfers.

Onboarding a business is a core part of working with the GrailPay Payments API. This guide outlines the business onboarding workflow and provides context for common use cases. For complete request and response schemas, refer to the OpenAPI documentation.

Note

A business is a specialized type of person in the GrailPay Payments API. While the onboarding process is similar to that of a person, it includes additional fields and requirements. If you are transferring funds on behalf of a business entity, it must be onboarded using the business registration flow to meet compliance and regulatory obligations.

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Testing

When testing in GrailPay’s sandbox environment, you can create a business as usual. To include a bank account, simply use any random 12-digit account number along with one of our supported test routing numbers.

For more details, refer to the Technical Overview guide.

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Step 1: Collect Business Information

To create a business we need to collect information about the point of contact and the information about the business itself, you can provide any combination of the following fields:

Point of Contact Information:

• First name ( point of contact for the business )
• Last name ( point of contact for the business )
• Email
• Phone

Business Information:

• Name ( legal name of the business )
• Address ( business address )

Note

While only a bank account is required to create a business, we strongly recommend supplying full information to ensure a smooth onboarding experience and help meet regulatory and compliance standards.

See OpenAPI documentation for the full payload and optional parameters such as client_reference_id.

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Step 2: Link to a Merchant for Billing Attribution

If you want to associate billable events with a merchant, include the billing_merchant_uuid in your request payload. This value should reference a KYB-verified merchant. You will receive this UUID when you onboard the merchant using the Onboard a Merchant endpoint.

Field: billing_merchant_uuid — UUID of the merchant that should receive billing attribution.

This enables GrailPay to accurately report on merchant usage and ensures billing traceability across your organization.

Note

While adding a billing merchant UUID is not required, we strongly recommend supplying this information to ensure accurate tracking of usage for your internal billing purposes.

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Step 3: Provide a Bank Account

You can onboard a person with or without a connected bank account. If you choose to provide one, we support two methods:

Option A: Link a Plaid Account

If you’re using Plaid for bank account linking, include the following fields:

• bank_account.plaid.access_token
• bank_account.plaid.account_id

For integration details, refer to the OpenAPI documentation.

Option B: Manual Entry

You can also onboard a person using manually provided account details:

• account_number
• routing_number
• account_name
• account_type (checking or savings)

Real-Time Validation (Recommended)

To reduce fraud risk and ensure funds can be successfully routed, we recommend enabling real-time bank account validation during onboarding. This feature is powered by our Account Intelligence product, which provides intelligent validation of routing and account numbers at the time of submission.

To enable this, include an actions object in your onboarding request:

Success (200)

{
    "actions": {
        "account_intelligence": {
            "version": "v3",
            "name_match": true
        }
    }
}

This validation step confirms that the provided routing and account numbers are both valid and correctly formatted. If name_match is enabled, it also checks that the account holder’s name aligns with the expected identity. In addition to these checks, the response includes a Risk Score and a set of decisioning insights that explain how the account was evaluated.

To understand the full structure of the response and how to interpret the results, refer to our Account Intelligence documentation.

Although optional, enabling this validation is strongly recommended for all production integrations to reduce failure rates and improve payout reliability.

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Step 4: Review the Response

Upon success, you’ll receive a response containing:

• The uuid of the person related to the business. This uuid is required for future operations such as linking bank accounts and initiating transfers.
• Echoed values such as name and address
• Status of the onboarding
• An account intelligence object (if validation was requested)

Full response schema is available in the OpenAPI Documentation.

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Try It Out

You can use the API Explorer to test onboarding flows interactively. This tool allows you to enter a payload, submit a request, and view the response in real time.

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Questions?

If you’re encountering any issues, please reach out to support@grailpay.com.

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