Know Your Customer - As a Service

KYC as a Service

Know Your Customer (KYC) is a regulatory requirement for any business that holds money or moves it on behalf of people. Building a compliant onboarding flow from scratch — identity document checks, liveness detection, sanctions screening, PEP lists — is expensive, slow, and requires maintaining your own compliance program.

With bunq's KYC as a Service, you delegate that entire process to a regulated bank. bunq handles the verification, stores the compliance record, and issues a verified user that your platform can immediately act on.

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The paradigm

When a new user signs up to your platform, you create a sub-user via the bunq API and kick off the KYC flow. bunq guides your user through identity verification (document upload + liveness check). Once verified, that user gets a bunq identity tied to your platform — ready to open accounts, receive payments, and use cards.

You never handle raw identity documents. bunq does the regulated heavy lifting; you get a simple boolean: verified or not.

Key things to understand:

• Sub-user model. Each end-user on your platform maps to a bunq sub-user object. KYC status lives on that sub-user.

• Verification is asynchronous. After initiating KYC, use a callback URL to receive the result rather than polling.

• Retries and failure states. A user can fail verification (e.g. blurry document) and retry. Your integration should handle PENDING, VERIFIED, and REJECTED states.

• Regulatory scope. bunq's KYC covers EU individuals. For corporate onboarding (KYB) or non-EU users, contact your bunq BaaS account manager.

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Flow overview

Your platform          bunq API
─────────────          ────────
POST /user         →   Creates sub-user shell
POST /kyc-request  →   Triggers identity verification flow
                   ←   Callback: KYC_RESULT (VERIFIED / REJECTED)
GET  /user/{id}    →   Fetch verified user object

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Relevant API endpoints

Action	Endpoint
Create a sub-user	POST /v1/user
Get user details / KYC status	GET /v1/user/{userID}
Set a callback URL for events	POST /v1/user/{userID}/notification-filter-url

The full KYC initiation endpoint and request schema are available upon request. Contact your BaaS account manager for the specific endpoint path for your integration tier.

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Callback payload

When verification completes, bunq sends a POST to your registered callback URL. The payload includes the user ID, the new KYC status, and a timestamp. Always verify the X-Bunq-Server-Signature header before processing.

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Common integration patterns

Pattern 1 — Verify before account creation. Gate monetary account creation on VERIFIED status. This is the safest approach and the most common for financial-product builders.

Pattern 2 — Optimistic onboarding. Let users start a limited flow (e.g. receive a payment link) before full KYC, and upgrade their permissions once verified. Requires careful UX design to avoid confusing users about what they can and can't do yet.