Though it may seem as though an online payment is just the movement of money from one place to another, the reality is more complex. Behind the scenes, Materio works with banking and underwriting partners to securely power MaterioPay. Think of a MaterioPay payment more like a short term loan to your firm rather than simply a movement of money through pipes. In other words, we and our partners bear certain risks for every payment you process.
Though MaterioPay does not impose hard limits on payment amounts or volume, in cases of a large or unusual payment, we may ask you to provide additional documentation before we release the funds to you. This helps to prevent fraud and enables us and our partners to manage the risk inherent in providing an online payment service to you.
Triggering a Document Request
There is no hard and fast rule for when additional documents may be required; it is based on a number of factors including the information you gave us in your application, your processing history to date with MaterioPay, and any specific situations such as an unusual payment or sequence of payments being processed.
However, at a minimum, if your payment amounts or volume are nearing (or exceeding) the estimated amounts that you gave us in your initial MaterioPay application, you can expect additional documents to be requested so that we can update your underwriting accordingly.
Document Request Process
When a document request is required, the payment(s) that triggered it will be paused for the duration of the review.
You will receive an email from our support team (support@materio.co) with specific instructions and a link to our secure document upload portal. The email will let you know the exact documents we need, but they typically include documents from one or more of these categories:
Any prior online payment processing statements (from other platforms)
Several consecutive months of bank statements
Several consecutive financial statements (balance sheet, P&L, etc.)
Tax returns from several consecutive years
When we receive the documents from you, we will review them looking to ensure that your firm has the financial stability and cash flow necessary in order to process the required amounts without undue risk to Materio or our partner institutions, including our underwriters.
Note: We store your documents securely and use them only for risk management and underwriting purposes related specifically to MaterioPay.
After Document Review
After we complete our document review, our support team will email you to let you know the result. In the majority of cases, the document review is successful and we are able to unpause the payment and schedule the payment funds to be released to you.
It is rare, but in the case where our document review determines that we cannot bear the risk for a certain transaction, the transaction will be cancelled and your client can retry the payment through a different method. You can still continue to process other smaller payments through MaterioPay and build up your processing history with us; the more successful history you build with MaterioPay over time, the more volume we can typically allow you to process in the future.