Merchant accounts

LotusPay clients access our services via one or more merchant accounts. Each merchant account is a data silo.

When you sign up to LotusPay, we create a merchant account for you. In most cases you'll probably only use one merchant account, unless you have a specialised requirement for additional merchant accounts.

Merchant account is a data silo. It strictly segregates resources such as mandates and debits, and those cannot be moved between merchant accounts.

• Merchant account is owned by our customer. Our customer is the party that is named in the merchant account. Our customer enters into our merchant agreement, pays our fees, owns the data in the merchant account, allows us to use their logo and name in our software, and authorises us to process NACH activity as per the NACH profile(s).

• The NACH activity in the merchant account is as per the NACH profile of the mandates and debits. This may or may not be your utility code, depending on how you've asked us to set up your NACH profiles. For example, if your merchant account belongs to Company X but your NACH profile is for Company Y, then Company X owns the data in LotusPay whereas Company Y owns the mandates in NPCI Mandate Management System.

• The dashboard and API shows all of the activity in a merchant account. Anyone that has a dashboard login or master API key can access all of the data in the merchant account. It is not possible to limit the access to specific resources. However, you can use roles to restrict permissions to admin/read-write/read-only.

You may want additional merchant accounts if:

• You have multiple utility codes and you want to segregate the activity of each NACH profile.

• You have multiple business divisions and you want to segregate the activity of each business division.

• You have a business arrangement with another party and you want to segregate that NACH activity from other NACH activity e.g. you're an NBFC partnering with a distribution channel partner, or a vice versa. If the third party owns the utility code, we'll need an authority letter from them permitting you the merchant to use it in our software. If you the merchant owns the utility code, we'll need an authority letter from you permitting the third party to use your merchant account. The first named party in the merchant account trading name owns the merchant account e.g. "CompanyA CompanyB" - here the merchant account is owned by CompanyA. If you're doing such partnership activity, you must create a dedicated merchant account for that partnership and you cannot use it for any other activity including your independent activity - regardless of whether you want to use the same/different utility code or same/different sponsor bank. This is to ensure clear segregation and avoids confusion about which mandates/debits are for which business arrangement. If you want to give your partner access to your merchant account, this segregation also ensures that your partner cannot see your other NACH activity. In this dedicated merchant account you may add the third party as one or more non-admin users, and you may share your API key with them. NB - Historically we have seen that some merchants start out intending not to give the third party access, but then later on they need to give access. It is not possible to segregate some mandates and debits within one merchant account for viewing by a third party. Hence we do not permit use of a common merchant account for multiple third party business arrangements. 

• You're taking our services from a sponsor bank where we are vendor to the bank, and you also want to take our services directly from us for some other sponsor bank. In this case you can't use a single merchant account for both sponsor banks, as the former merchant account would belong to the sponsor bank where we are a vendor to the bank, whereas the latter merchant account would belong to you.

Additional merchant accounts are chargeable. Contact LotusPay Support for pricing if your merchant agreement does not already contain the pricing for additional merchant accounts.