Organizations
The Tesser platform uses a flexible hierarchical structure to organize users, entities, and resources.
Structure Overview
The hierarchy consists of four primary building blocks:
- Organizations - Top-level business customers
- Entities - Operational units within an organization
- Accounts - Value-holding instruments that belong to entities
- Users - Human actors authenticated to operate the platform on behalf of the customer
Organizations
Organizations represent your company or business. Each organization typically has:
- Unique identifier - Used for resource isolation
- Entities - One or more entities within the organization
- Users - Members with roles and permissions
When a new organization is created, a single default entity may be provisioned. Additional entities can be created as needed to support complex operational structures.
Users
Users are individual accounts that operate within the customer's scope. We may associate users at the organization level or the entity level - the final association model is being validated. User management includes:
- Authentication - Secure access with enterprise identity options
- Authorization - Role-based access control
- Profile Management - User information and preferences
Entities
Entities are operational units within an organization. Key characteristics:
- Entity types -
suborg,beneficiary,originator - Resource ownership - Accounts and related resources belong to entities
- Accounts - Represent both bank accounts and wallets
- Multiplicity - Organizations can have many entities to reflect real-world structures
Accounts
Accounts are value-holding instruments associated to entities. They can represent:
- Crypto wallets (non-custodial and custodial)
- Bank accounts
- Mobile money wallets
- Other stores of value that can send or receive funds
Payments reference account identifiers as sources and destinations, enabling orchestration across wallet and fiat rails with one consistent model.
KYB and Onboarding
Onboarding includes KYB verification. Today, KYB is initiated via email. API-based KYB is coming soon.
Accounts (wallets and bank accounts) can be generated prior to KYB to support testing and integration. However, payment intent creation is blocked until the entity has completed KYB.
Custody and Operating Models
Tesser supports multiple custody and operational models so customers can choose what fits their business:
- Self-custody and custodial options - Hold and manage stablecoins with either self-custody or a third-party custodian
- Omnibus with sub-ledgers - A single omnibus wallet managed by the customer, with sub-ledgering provided by Tesser to manage and reconcile both the customer's funds and their customers' funds
- Individual wallets per customer - Dedicated on-network wallets for each end customer
Requirement for self-custody - Customers need to securely manage private keys used for transaction signing. Tesser provides guidance on the infrastructure to enable this.
Example Topologies
This model supports arbitrarily complex structures, including:
- A bank with regional entities and product-specific entities
- A payment orchestrator with many end customers and per-customer entities
- A PSP enabling p2p remittances through their own regulated stack
- Omnibus ledgers or individual wallets per customer depending on operational preference