Adds support for ownership exemption reason to the Accounts API

What’s new

Adds the ownership_exemption_reason parameter to the company field of the Accounts resource.

Ultimate beneficial owners are persons that, directly or indirectly, own a significant share and/or exercise significant control over your business. These persons are usually represented as owners, directors, or executives on a Stripe account.

To fulfill Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements, Stripe can collect, match, and verify the ultimate beneficial owners for a business. Some businesses might qualify for an exception to the standard process for collecting and verifying ultimate beneficial owners. When businesses qualify for an exception, they can submit an ownership exemption reason that resolves ultimate beneficial ownership requirements and verifications from their account.

After you submit an ownership exemption reason, Stripe verifies the exemption reason in lieu of verifying the ultimate beneficial owners on the account. Stripe might reach out to either the account or the platform to collect additional documentation to complete this verification.

Stripe currently supports two ownership exemption reasons:

• qualified_entity_exceeds_ownership_threshold: A qualified entity or set of qualified entities own a significant share of the account’s business.
• qualifies_as_financial_institution: The account qualifies as a financial institution.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/accounts/
{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}}
/ \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -d "company[ownership_exemption_reason]"=qualified_entity_exceeds_ownership_threshold

The ownership exemption reason isn’t supported in all countries. Accounts that can use this process receive the ownership_exemption_reason requirement in their requirements field. If verification of the ownership exemption reason fails, the account receives the verification_rejected_ownership_exemption_reason error code on the requirement and must complete the standard process for ultimate beneficial ownership verification.

If providing an ownership exemption reason is supported, you see country-specific guidelines with supported reasons and their definitions.

For example, in Singapore qualified entities are defined as government entities, public companies, and financial institutions. The ownership threshold is defined as 75%.

For an account in Singapore to declare that a qualified entity exceeds ownership threshold, one or more government entities, public companies, or financial institutions must own 75% or more of the account’s company.

Impact

You can use the ownership exemption reason field to declare that your connected account qualifies for an exception to the standard process for ultimate beneficial ownership verification. This removes requirements and verifications for ultimate beneficial owners and triggers a verification based on the ownership exemption reason instead.

Changes

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