Concepts

Compliance

Tesser provides comprehensive compliance management to meet regulatory requirements for financial institutions.

Our compliance framework includes:

• KYB (Know Your Business): Entity-level verification required by integrated providers
• Transaction Screening & Risk Scoring: Automated screening of all payment destinations with risk categorization
• Manual Review: Workflow for reviewing medium and high-risk transactions
• Travel Rule Compliance: Automated collection and transmission of required originator/beneficiary data

KYB (Know Your Business)

Tesser centralizes KYB across all integrated providers (on-ramps, off-ramps, custodians) and jurisdictions:

• Single onboarding profile captured once and reused wherever possible
• Provider-specific additions collected only when required
• Multi-country support with provider suitability handled by Tesser
• Unified status tracking and operational visibility in one place
• Current flow: email-based onboarding; API KYB is coming soon

The KYB process typically involves providing:

• Business registration documents
• Ownership and beneficial ownership information
• Business activity and purpose
• Authorized signatories

Note: Payment intent creation is restricted until KYB is approved by the relevant providers. Accounts can be created prior to KYB to support testing and integration.

Transaction Screening & Risk Scoring

Every payment destination is automatically screened against multiple compliance databases and assigned a risk category:

Screening Sources:

• Sanctions lists: OFAC and international sanctions databases
• Risk databases: Known high-risk addresses and entities
• Transaction history: Analysis of address activity patterns

Risk Categories:

• Low Risk: Automatic approval
• Medium Risk: May require manual review
• High Risk: Requires manual review
• Severe Risk: Automatically blocked

Risk Profiles

Tesser offers three pre-configured risk profiles to match your organization's risk appetite:

1. Conservative: Lower risk thresholds, more transactions require manual review
2. Balanced: Moderate risk tolerance with selective manual review
3. Permissive: Higher risk tolerance, fewer manual reviews required

Each profile defines how the platform responds to different risk categories. Need a custom risk profile? Contact us to configure specific thresholds and actions tailored to your requirements.

Risk Profile Endpoints

Get the current organization's risk profile:

Code
 
curl -X GET https://api.tesser.xyz/organizations/risk-profile \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer your-access-token"

Update the organization's risk profile:

Code
 
curl -X PATCH https://api.tesser.xyz/organizations/risk-profile \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer your-access-token" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "riskProfile": "balanced"
  }'

Notes:

• Allowed values align with the profiles above (e.g., conservative, balanced, permissive).
• Changes take effect for subsequent screenings and automated actions.

Manual Review Process

Payments requiring manual review can be processed through the compliance review endpoint (/payments/{paymentId}/review):

Code
 
curl -X POST https://api.tesser.xyz/payments/{paymentId}/review \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer your-access-token" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "isApproved": true
  }'

The response includes reviewer identity, timestamp, and final decision.

Travel Rule

Tesser handles travel rule requirements automatically as you use the platform:

• No special actions are required to be compliant — the platform ensures required originator/beneficiary data is attached to payments where applicable.
• During account creation, we collect the information needed to support compliant payments to/from that account (jurisdiction- and method-specific).
• In rare cases, additional KYB details may be requested at payment intent or execution time to satisfy provider- or corridor-specific rules.