Connect your account

Verify your identity and connect your bank account to start accepting payments online, without leaving Cord.

Everything inside Cord

Unlike traditional payment checkouts that take you to another page or force you to use an external dashboard, Cord Payments lives 100% inside the app — the connection wizard, identity verification, and managing your bank account are all native Cord screens, with your own look and feel, not a third-party form.

Cord charges a fee for every payment you process (see the full detail in Fees and advantages) — this document only covers the connection process, not what it costs to use it.

How to get started

Where it’s available

Cord Payments — card payments inside the link — is available today in Mexico, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany and France.

In Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Peru you can open your Cord account and use everything else — quoting, invoicing, chasing collections and recording the payments you receive by bank transfer — but online payments don’t operate there yet. Settings › Payments tells you so instead of letting you start a verification that can’t complete.

What the wizard asks for comes from your business’s country: the tax identifier (RFC in Mexico, NIF/CIF in Spain, EIN in the United States), the ID document accepted, and your deposit account’s format. Cord validates that format before sending it, so a mistyped digit is caught by Cord rather than bounced by the bank days later.

1. Go to Settings › Payments inside the app.
2. If your account is in “New” status, click Start verification.
3. Complete the 8-step wizard:

Step	What it captures
1. Entity type	Whether your business operates as an individual or a legal entity, and the business category (MCC).
2. Business details	Legal name, your country’s tax identifier, and the details you invoice under.
3. Fiscal address	Your business’s registered fiscal address.
4. Identity	Personal details of the legal representative or the individual operating the account. The fields change by country: Mexico asks for CURP or personal RFC, the United States for the last 4 of the SSN, and Spain, Germany, France and the UK ask for no personal ID at all, because verification in those countries doesn’t use one.
5. People and control	The full list of who controls the business: the legal representative and every person owning 25% or more, each with their own role and percentage. This is an anti-money-laundering requirement, not a Cord preference — see People and beneficial owners below.
6. Verification	Official ID capture for each person — see LiveCapture below.
7. Bank account	The account where you want to receive your deposits, in your country’s format: CLABE in Mexico, IBAN in Spain and Germany, routing + account in the United States, sort code in the UK, transit in Canada, bank + branch in Brazil.
8. Terms	You accept the handling of your data and Cord Payments’ current fee schedule — it’s the same step where you confirm how much Cord will charge you to process each payment.

The wizard picks up exactly where you left off if you leave halfway through — you won’t have to recapture what you already saved. If Cord detects a specific missing requirement (say, a photo that came out blurry), it sends you straight to that particular step instead of restarting the whole process.

People and beneficial owners

In the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada, declaring beneficial owners (people holding 25% or more) is a legal obligation, not an optional formality. Step 5 is a list, not a checkbox:

• You add each person with their details, role and percentage.
• One person can hold several roles at once — legal representative, owner, director, executive — and each is ticked separately. If your legal representative is a hired director with no shares, that’s what gets declared: they aren’t credited with ownership they don’t have.
• Each person carries their own identity verification, with its status visible in the list.
• The final declaration that the list is complete appears after you’ve built it, and only when your country’s verification requires it.

A company with three shareholders at 30% each declares all three. If you could only declare one, the account would never activate: the verification system would keep asking for the ones missing.

Identity verification with LiveCapture

For financial regulatory reasons, verifying your identity and the legitimacy of your business (KYC — Know Your Customer) is mandatory. Cord uses a native system called LiveCapture that does this in seconds, directly from your browser or your phone:

• You pick which document you’ll use first. The list is your country’s: INE in Mexico, DNI in Spain, Personalausweis in Germany, CNH in Brazil, state licence in the United States. That choice sets the shape of the camera frame and decides whether you’ll be asked for the back — a passport doesn’t have one, so that step is skipped automatically.
• The system asks for permission to access your camera and you capture the document.
• If verification asks for it, you also capture proof of address: a recent utility bill or bank statement in that person’s name. It has to be a different document from the ID.
• All of this happens without uploading files or opening third-party pages — the camera lives right inside the same Cord screen. If you’d rather use your phone’s camera app, or you already have the photo, the button to choose a file is always available.

Cord checks the photo before sending it

The most common cause of a rejection isn’t an invalid document: it’s a photo that can’t be read. Before sending anything, Cord measures the image and tells you what to fix — it’s blurry, there isn’t enough light, a glare is covering a field, the document blends into the background.

Those are advice, not blocks: if you think the photo is fine, you send it anyway. Only two things are stopped outright, because the verification system always rejects them and waiting for that rejection would cost you days:

• A black-and-white photo of a photo ID. It has to be in colour.
• A very low-resolution photo, where the document can’t be read.

Identity documents are sent as JPG or PNG. A PDF only works for proof of address and company documents.

The “continue on your phone” link is single-use

When you generate the QR code from your computer, the link it creates:

• Is bound to the first phone that opens it. If someone else intercepts it and opens it on another device, it stops working.
• Lives for 30 minutes, and only 15 from the moment you first open it.
• Has an attempt limit. Using it up closes the link; you generate a new one from your computer in one click.
• Won’t accept the same photo twice. If a document was rejected, you need to take a new photo: re-sending the same file fails automatically.

If a document is rejected, we tell you why

When the verification system rejects a photo, Cord shows you the exact reason on that person’s card: the image isn’t readable, the document has expired, the name doesn’t match what you entered, the back is missing. Without that reason, the only option was to upload the same photo again and hope for a different outcome.

Your account’s status

Depending on your progress, your payments account shows different statuses:

• New: you haven’t started the process yet. No automatic method is available.
• Pending: you started the process but verification is still in progress, or a requirement is missing (for example, re-capturing a photo). Card and SPEI are still blocked.
• Active: everything is ready — your identity and your bank account are confirmed. You can now charge, and the money flows automatically into your account with every deposit.