Self-Service Merchant Onboarding for Account Updater and Network Tokens

When a platform is managing dozens, or hundreds of other merchants, the gap between the enrichment service and how you get onboarded can become a bottleneck.

Card enrichment services like account updater or network tokens exist to keep stored payment data current. But enrolling a merchant or another platform in these services hasn’t matched the “programmable” promise of the actual service. It’s still a form, an email, and a lot of waiting.

Today, there’s an API for enrichment onboarding and we’ve made it available through the portal as well. The portal adds enriched validation and a visual aspect to be sure you’re entering the right information on the first try. The process of getting onboarded can happen without forms and email threads. It’s a status you can track yourself.

What’s New? 

Basis Theory is introducing the Merchant concept to enable multiple account updater and network token configurations within a single Tenant.

• Configuration settings stay separate. Onboarding or updating one merchant's account updater or network token setup never touches another merchant's configuration.
• Structure matches your business. Each sub-organization or business unit can get its own clean configuration.
• Built for scale. With more controls being added over time, the Merchant entity is the foundation to build on.

Automated onboarding is what makes this practical. Without it, every new Merchant a customer creates would still require manual support to get onboarded, which defeats the point of giving platforms their own configuration per merchant in the first place.

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How does merchant onboarding work? 

Onboarding a merchant for account updater or network tokens can happen through the API or customer portal.

1. Create a Merchant. Each merchant is its own entity, holding business details, and separately, the enrichment services configured for it. A platform managing multiple merchants can create one per merchant it onboards, rather than managing everything at the tenant level. This is something Basis Theory will enable, and advise during customer integrations.
2. Submit onboarding configuration. Once the merchant exists, enrichment details go in per service, and per network. Account Uudater and network tokens are configured separately, and each supports its own network-specific fields (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover).
3. Track status. Every service and network has its own status: pending, onboarding, active, or failed. Instead of waiting on a reply, a merchant's onboarding progress is visible directly. Updates to the status can be available through webhooks, Portal, and API.
4. Start using the merchant. Once a service is active, the merchant's ID is ready to use in account updater or network token API calls.

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Get Started with the Documentation 

This is the first step toward a fully automated onboarding experience. A few things are already in motion:

• Direct API integration with Pagos, replacing today's provider relay once Pagos ships their own onboarding API.
• Just-in-time card updates for account updater, applying updates right before a transaction runs instead of on a batch cycle.

Onboarding a merchant for account updater or network tokens now starts with the Merchants API.

This guide walks through the end-to-end process of onboarding a customer’s merchant for account updater or network token services.

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