In case 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 our banking partners to manage the risk inherent in providing an online payment service to you.
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:
Business bank statements from the most recent three months
Business tax returns from the most recent two years
Profit & Loss statements from the prior year and current year-to-date
Balance sheet as of your most recent month-end
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.
Why This Happens
When we request additional documentation, it is not a sign that anything is wrong with your account or with MaterioPay. It simply means that a transaction exceeds the amount our underwriting partners have previously reviewed for you.
This requirement does not come from Materio but rather is a result of how the ACH system works. Under NACHA rules, banks are financially liable for ACH disputes or reversals for up to 60 days after settlement. For example, if a client disputes a $250k ACH payment, the full $250k must be returned to the client.
To manage this legal and financial exposure, banks apply internal risk controls to large or atypical transactions. When we request supporting financial documentation, it’s to help advocate for your payment to be approved. Our underwriting partners review account activity, balances, and liquidity to confirm the receiving business could cover a payment if a refund or chargeback were ever required.
Thankfully, as you provide documentation and build more processing history, additional documents may be requested less frequently in the future, and the pre-approval process may be faster when it does occur.
For additional support, contact support@materio.co with any questions about this process; we are here to help!