Terms of Service

By accessing or using Payshen (the “Service”) you agree to these Terms. If you use the Service on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you have authority to bind it.

These Terms cover everyone who uses the platform: merchants and their team members, payment service providers (PSPs) using the partner portal, and visitors to this site. Where you have signed an order form or commercial agreement with us, that document prevails over these Terms if the two conflict.

The Service is offered to businesses. It is not directed to consumers or to anyone under 18, and nothing in these Terms is intended to remove a right that the law where you live gives you and does not allow to be removed by contract.

Payshen is a payment orchestration and provider connectivity layer. It routes payment authorisation traffic across the payment providers you have connected, retries declines on a backup provider, gives you one view of payments, fees and reconciliation, and carries your provider applications and onboarding documents to the PSPs you choose.

Equally, what it is not:

• Payshen does not hold, move or take custody of funds. Settlement happens directly between you and your providers under your own agreements with them.
• Payshen is not an acquirer, a payment institution, an e-money issuer or a party to your provider agreements, and does not provide regulated payment services.
• Payshen does not decide whether a PSP accepts you. See section 7.

The platform currently runs in build mode. The routing engine, payment lifecycle, APIs, analytics and portals are fully functional, but unless a live provider connection has been activated for your workspace, payment outcomes - approvals, declines, captures, refunds - are produced by a built-in simulator. No money moves and no real card is charged.

Simulated activity is labelled as such in the product, and the hosted payment page used in this mode is a clearly marked sandbox. You must not present simulated results to your own customers, investors or regulators as real transactions, and you must not rely on them as evidence that a payment has been taken.

Live processing requires a provider connection to be activated explicitly for your workspace. We will confirm that in writing before it happens.

Payshen does not perform 3-D Secure or Strong Customer Authentication. Where a payment requires cardholder authentication, that step is carried out by your payment provider on its own hosted page, which is where the redirect flow sends the payer. Making sure your checkout meets SCA, PSD2 and card-scheme requirements is your responsibility, not ours.

What Payshen does do is work out whether a payment falls in scope, record the authentication result your provider reports back, and show you who carries fraud liability as a result. That is a working position to help you ask your provider the right question - it is not legal or compliance advice, and the rules that bind you are the ones in your acquirer agreement.

No Payshen surface collects card details, so we do not store, process or transmit cardholder data and we are not part of your PCI DSS cardholder data environment. If you handle card data in your own systems, PCI compliance for those systems remains yours.

• You are responsible for everything that happens under your workspace, including the actions of the team members you invite and the roles you grant them.
• API keys are shown once, at creation. Keep them secret, use the sandbox key for testing and the production key only for live traffic, and rotate a key immediately if it may have been exposed. Tell us as soon as you suspect a compromise.
• You are responsible for maintaining your own provider relationships and the credentials you enter for them.

You may not use the Service for unlawful activity, to process payments you are not authorised to process, to process on behalf of an undisclosed third party, to probe or breach security without our written permission, or in a way that degrades the Service for others. You must also observe the restrictions your own providers and the card schemes place on your business category.

When you apply to a PSP through the platform, Payshen transmits your application and the documents you explicitly choose to share, and tracks the status. That is the whole of our role.

Acceptance, rejection, pricing, limits and any later risk decision are made solely by that PSP under its own criteria and regulatory duties. We do not underwrite applicants, do not guarantee that any application will be approved or how long a review will take, and do not act as agent for either side.

PSPs using the partner portal agree to use merchant data and shared documents only to assess and service that application, and to handle them as controller under their own privacy policy and applicable law.

• Your data stays yours. You grant us the licence needed to store and process it in order to run the Service for you.
• Uploading a document, and attaching it to an application, is your instruction to us to hold it and to pass it on. You confirm you may lawfully share the personal data it contains, including data about directors and beneficial owners.
• Export what you need before you delete a workspace: deletion is permanent and cascades to payments, documents, business records and audit entries.
• How we handle personal data is set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

Fees, and the mix of subscription, per-transaction and volume components, are those stated in your order form. Usage is measured by the Service and billed in arrears. Amounts are exclusive of VAT and other applicable taxes, which you pay in addition.

The Service is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We may update, suspend or discontinue features, and will make reasonable efforts to give notice of material changes. No service level or uptime commitment applies unless one is set out in your order form; in build mode, none does.

You may stop using the Service and delete your workspace at any time. We may suspend or terminate access for non-payment, unlawful or prohibited use, or a security risk to the platform or its other users, and will tell you why unless we are legally prevented from doing so. Where circumstances allow, we will give you a reasonable opportunity to export your data first.

To the extent permitted by law we disclaim implied warranties, including fitness for a particular purpose. We do not warrant that routing will improve your approval rates or reduce your costs in any specific case, and we are not responsible for the acts, decisions, outages or fees of your payment providers.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Payshen is not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential damages, or for lost profits, revenue or data. Our total liability arising from the Service is capped at the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

We never hold, receive or transmit your funds. Money moves directly between you, your payment provider and your acquirer, under your own agreement with them. We route the instruction and record what happened; we are never in the flow of funds, and we hold no client money, e-money or safeguarded accounts.

It follows that BCE Ventures is not a payment institution, e-money institution, money services business, bank or money transmitter, and is not licensed or registered as one. We do not provide payment services within the meaning of PSD2 or its UK equivalent, and we are not your acquirer. Where a payment figure in the product concerns money that has moved, it is a record of what your provider reported, not an account we hold.

Underwriting, settlement, payouts, chargeback liability and regulatory obligations such as KYC, AML and sanctions screening on your business belong to your payment provider. We pass an application to a provider and show you its answer; we never make the decision. See section 7.

BCE Ventures is a United States company, so US sanctions and export control law applies to what we may provide and to whom. You confirm that you, your owners and your users are not subject to sanctions administered by OFAC, the United Nations, the European Union or the United Kingdom, and are not located in a comprehensively sanctioned territory.

You will not use the Service in breach of those regimes, and we may suspend or terminate immediately - without notice where the law requires it - if we reasonably believe continuing would put us in breach. This is one of the few places where we cannot give you a cure period, and it is better said now than discovered later.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States of America, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and the parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in the State of Wyoming. Where you have signed an order form that states a different law or forum, that document prevails for you. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

This choice does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law where you are established, and it does not affect data protection. Your data protection rights, the supervisory authority you may complain to, and the transfer mechanisms are governed by your own regime, as set out in the Privacy Policy and the DPA- including, where they apply, the Standard Contractual Clauses, which carry their own governing law and forum and are not overridden by this section.

Before starting proceedings the parties will first try in good faith to resolve any dispute between themselves.

We may update these Terms; the date at the top of this page always reflects the current version, and we will notify workspace owners of material changes.

Questions about these Terms? Use the contact form on our home page.