How Does TrueLayer Verify Players’ Ages?

To keep everything above board, most competition businesses — yours probably included — require participants to be 18 or older for their online competitions.  But how can you be sure that the payers are actually over 18?  It’s a bit tricky! But don’t worry, TrueLayer has got you covered. 

So, firstly, this is an optional feature. If you enable it, you won’t receive single payments from users who don’t meet certain age or name requirements (i.e. who are not 18+). 

TrueLayer will screen the name or date of birth of the payer before the payment can reach your merchant account.  This happens in a TrueLayer intermediary account, so you won’t have to worry about fraudulent payments or underage customers touching your bank account. 

Great, huh?

This means less risk for you and more time saved since you won’t need to manually screen or refund payments. If a payer doesn’t meet the age or name requirements, TrueLayer will simply send the payment back to them. This feature is useful for businesses like yours that want to ensure they’re only accepting payments from users who meet the requirements. It helps keep your competitions legal, too, as those under 18 won’t be allowed to purchase a ticket with this feature.

Before the money reaches your account, it has a few pit stops to make:

1. Payment leaves user’s bank account

2. Payment is created and authorised with bank

3. Payment settles in a TrueLayer intermediary account (here, TrueLayer checks the information associated with the user’s bank account) 

4. Then, depending on what TrueLayer finds in their check, the payment either:

   1. Is sent back to the user if their name doesn’t match remitter bank account or they’re under 18

   2. Is sent to you, the merchant, if the name matches remitter bank account or the payer is over 18

5. If the latter scenario happens, the payment will settle into your merchant account

The most important thing you need to know is: before you can enable verification, you’ll need to contact TrueLayer. This is so they can enable it for your merchant account. Without their enabling it, adding verification to a payment will have no effect.  Please refer to TrueLayer’s website for more information.

The payment verification can go only one of two ways. If it passes, then — YAY !— it’s pay day for you, you lucky duck. 💸 The money will arrive in your account with the ‘settled’ status. And if it fails, well… it fails with a status of ‘failed’ and a failure reason of verification_declined.  That’s okay, though. The money will come from elsewhere, and from someone legit. Think of it this way: at least you narrowly avoided being involved in some weird, phoney situation. Thank God TrueLayer’s keepin’ it real!

Say no more! Just give us a shout, and we’ll introduce you to TrueLayer.  In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about TrueLayer, our partnership with them, and our Payment Gateway, Zap Pay, we’ve got some thrilling reads for you:

1. What is TrueLayer, and What’s Involved in the Onboarding Process?

2. How Do the Merchant and Cash Accounts Work Together?

3. All You Need to Know about Zap Pay