How accounts work

This section is for platforms and resellers — anyone boarding merchants rather than taking their own payments. If you are integrating a single merchant account that already exists, you can skip it and start at Accept a card payment.

A client is an account that can process payments. Every transaction belongs to exactly one, and there are two kinds.

Both values are lowercase, exactly as written. MERCHANT is rejected.

Clients form a tree. parent_id on a client names the reseller or ISO above it, and that relationship is set once, when the client is created.

reseller  CLIENT-…A
├── merchant  CLIENT-…B     parent_id: CLIENT-…A
├── merchant  CLIENT-…C     parent_id: CLIENT-…A
└── reseller  CLIENT-…D     parent_id: CLIENT-…A
    └── merchant  CLIENT-…E parent_id: CLIENT-…D

A reseller sees its own subtree. A merchant sees only itself.

Creating a client issues an API key for it. That key and the client's ID are what authenticate its requests.

The key is returned once, on the create response, and no later call returns it again. Store it then or reissue the client.

A reseller does not need its merchants' keys. It authenticates as itself and names the merchant in the X-Acting-As-Client-Id header.

That is how a platform runs a transaction, reads a report, or boards an integration on a merchant's behalf. See Act on behalf of a client.

A client cannot process anything until it has an integration — the processor credentials that connect it to TSYS for cards or VeriCheck for ACH.

One client can hold both. The payment method in a transaction decides which one handles it. See Connect a processor.

Worth knowing before you design around them:

• No users. There is no public user, role, or permission resource. A client is the unit of access, and its API key is the credential.
• No delete. Clients and integrations cannot be removed through the API. Deactivate an integration with is_active: false.
• No customers. The gateway stores no customer records. Your application owns the relationship between a person and a saved payment method.

• Create and update a client
• Connect a processor
• Act on behalf of a client