Verification

Settings → Verification is where you get the account cleared for real money. You file it; we review it.

Reading needs kyc.read — owner, admin and finance. Filing needs kyc.write — owner and admin only, because a submission declares the business’s legal identity.

One verification for the whole organisation

Verification is of the company, not of an account. If your company runs several accounts — one per app or brand — it is done once, on the primary account, and every other account shares the result: its level, its expiry and the scopes and limits that come with it.

On any other account this tab shows the shared verification, but filing, uploading or changing anything is refused with a message naming the primary account to switch to. Renewals happen there too. See Accounts.

This used to be an email

Getting verified once meant sending identity documents to a person, which is slower than the review itself and puts passports in mailboxes. The whole gathering flow is now yours to run from this tab. The decision stays ours — whether a document is genuine is not something the party being checked can be asked to judge.

The levels

Level	Name	What it is	Live money?
0	Unverified	Account created. Test environment only.	No
1	Basic	Individual identity verified. Low-value collections. No business registration needed.	Collections
2	Standard	Registered business with a verified settlement account.	Collections, payouts, refunds, higher limits
3	Enhanced	Full due diligence including directors and beneficial owners. Required for high-value and higher-risk businesses.	Everything, highest limits

What each level requires

Level	Documents	Checks we run
1	Ghana Card number, selfie	ID verification with NIA, liveness, face match
2	Ghana Card number, selfie, business registration, proof of address	The above, plus name enquiry, business registry, sanctions screening
3	Ghana Card number, selfie, business registration, business certificate, tax certificate, proof of address, bank statement	The above, plus PEP screening and adverse media. Each director and beneficial owner is verified too.

The Ghana Card is given by its number only — see The Ghana Card: number, never a copy.

Levels 1 and 2 stand for 24 months; level 3 for 12, after which the account needs re-verifying. The tab shows your expiry date, and the Submissions panel is the record of every attempt.

What a level unlocks on your API keys

Each API scope carries a minimum verification level in the live environment:

Scope	Minimum level
collection.create — charge a customer	1
customer.write — store customer records	1
verification.create — run a name enquiry	1
payout.create — send money out	2
refund.create — refund a collection	2
billing.write — create plans and subscriptions	1
Every read scope — transactions, balances, settlements, webhooks, reference	0

Test is never gated

The sandbox moves no money, so every scope is grantable on a test key at level 0. You can build and test the entire integration, including payouts and refunds, before anybody has looked at a document.

The cap applies to live keys only, and the key creation form shows you the narrowed list rather than letting you mint a key that would be refused in production.

What the tab shows

Field	Notes
Status	Where your current submission stands.
Current level	What you hold now.
Working towards	The level of the open submission, if any.
Approved	When your current level was granted.
Expires	When it needs renewing.

Plus three panels:

• Submissions — every time documents were sent for review, with the outcome.
• Documents — what is on file and what each one is for.
• What each level requires — the ladder, with You are here on your current level and Reached on the ones below it.

Filing a submission

1. Apply for a level

Start verification → “Apply for a verification level”. The dialog is explicit that “nothing is sent to us by this step. It opens the submission and tells you what to upload.”

Field	Required	Notes
Level	Yes	Which level you are applying for.
Registered business name	No	“Exactly as it appears on your registration. Leave blank if it has not changed.”
Registration number	No	—
Tax identification	No	—
Business type	No	“What the registry says — sole proprietor, limited company, partnership.”
Anything we should know	No	Up to 2,000 characters. Anything a reviewer should read before opening the documents.

Those first four are the fields the business profile refuses to edit, and this is why: they are KYC inputs. The legal name is what a bank’s name enquiry is compared against; the registration number is what a company lookup is run on. They are snapshotted onto the submission and applied to your account only if a reviewer approves it.

Get the legal name exactly right

It is compared against the company registry and against the name on your settlement account. A trading name where a registered name belongs is the single most common cause of a rejected submission, and it costs a full round trip.

2. Give your Ghana Card number and upload the documents

The submission lists what this level needs, and what is still missing. Each required document gets its own slot; anything extra is grouped under “Also attached, beyond what this level needs” — use Attach something else for whatever a reviewer has asked you for specifically.

Files go straight into our private document store, never through this page’s API. A checksum is computed in your browser before the upload is even authorised, so a file your browser cannot read fails immediately rather than becoming a document a reviewer opens and finds empty.

The Ghana Card: number, never a copy

The Ghana Card slot reads Ghana Card (number only) and has an Enter number button instead of an upload — “we check the number with the National Identification Authority. No photo or copy of the card is taken or stored.”

Type the number as it is printed: GHA-XXXXXXXXX-X. Spaces and missing dashes are forgiven. Once recorded it is shown masked, as GHA-*****6789-0.

This is the law, not a preference. L.I. 2523, in force since 9 June 2026 with compliance required by 2 November 2026, makes it an offence to photocopy, scan, retain or visually inspect a Ghana Card for verification; verification is done through NIA. So PaySigna refuses a Ghana Card upload outright — from you, from our own staff, and at the database itself — and never holds an image of one. What we keep is the number, encrypted, with a masked copy for display and a keyed fingerprint so the same card on two accounts can be spotted.

• Directors and owners give their Ghana Card number the same way: choose the person, then pick the Ghana Card under Attach something else.
• Other IDs still upload. A passport or driver’s licence — a foreign director’s, say — is uploaded as before.
• The selfie (on levels that ask for one) is matched against the photo NIA holds for that card number.

Uploads

Each upload asks one question that decides whether the file is usable:

Field	Notes
Whose document is it	“A passport belongs to a person, not to the business.” Filing a director’s ID against the business is the most common reason a submission comes back asking for documents you already sent.
Attach something else	“Anything a reviewer asked you for.” Use it for a document the list does not name, rather than filing it under a type it is not.

At level 3, Declare a director or owner is the other half of the submission — “a natural person behind the business. We verify each of them in their own right.”

Field	Notes
First name / Last name	As the ID reads, not as they are known.
Role	Director, officer or beneficial owner.
Ownership	“As a percentage. Leave blank for someone who holds no shares.”
Nationality	Two-letter country code.
Date of birth	A screening input. A person declared without one cannot meaningfully be screened, which stalls the whole level rather than just their row.

Documents can be removed up until you submit.

What makes a document pass first time:

• The whole document in frame, all four corners, no fingers over the text.
• Readable at a glance. If you cannot read the expiry date on your screen, neither can a reviewer.
• Current. An expired ID or a registration certificate past its renewal is a rejection, not a query.
• The same name across all of them. An ID in a maiden name and a registration in a married one needs an explanation in the notes field, not a hope that nobody notices.
• A selfie that is plainly you, in daylight, no sunglasses, no filter — it is compared with the photo NIA holds for your Ghana Card.
• A Ghana Card number typed exactly. A wrong digit fails the NIA check.

3. Send it for review

Send it for review — with a declaration to tick: “These documents are genuine and the details are correct.”

The button says send for review, never verify, and that is the honest description: submitting grants nothing by itself.

4. While it is with us

The tab shows With us for review — “your documents are fixed while we review them, which is what makes the decision answerable afterwards.”

You cannot add to, remove from or edit a submitted package. What was sent is what the decision was made on. If you realise something is missing, wait for the outcome — a reviewer who needs more will ask, and the request appears against the submission.

What the review can do that you cannot

• Grant the level. Your current_level only moves when a reviewer approves.
• Mark a document approved or rejected. Everything you upload is created as submitted, meaning nobody has looked at it. A merchant able to write “approved” would be approving their own identity.
• Set the retention date. Stamped from the level’s retention policy, because that date is when a data-erasure request fires.

Levels 0 and 1 can be approved automatically when every check passes. Levels 2 and 3 always need a human, so expect a wait measured in working hours rather than seconds.

You are emailed at each decision: when a single document is rejected (with which one and why, so you can replace it), and when the level is approved or the submission rejected. A level we grant directly, without a submission, sends the same approval email and the merchant.kyc_approved webhook.

If a submission is rejected

Read the reason on the submission in the Submissions panel. Then open a new submission — the old one is a closed record and is deliberately not editable.

The usual causes, in order of frequency:

1. The legal name does not match the registry or the settlement account.
2. A document is unreadable, cropped, or expired.
3. The selfie does not match the ID photo, or the Ghana Card number does not match the name and date of birth NIA holds.
4. The business type declared does not match the registration.
5. For level 3, a director or beneficial owner has not been verified.

If uploads are unavailable

You may see: “Documents cannot be uploaded from this deployment right now. That is a fault on our side, not a problem with your file. Your verification status and everything already on file are unaffected.”

That is exactly what it says — our document store is unreachable. Nothing is wrong with your photograph and nothing already filed is lost. Try later, and tell us if it persists.

Related

• API keys — what your level lets a live key do.
• Settings — the read-only legal identity fields that this flow is the only way to change.
• Going live — the integration-side checklist.