Responsible person and service director details

Before your organisation can take live payments, the GOV.UK Pay payment service provider carries out customer due diligence checks to meet UK anti-money laundering requirements.

As part of these checks, the payment service provider needs information about relevant directors or equivalent senior people responsible for the organisation's operations and governance.

To complete the checks, you need to provide details of:

  • a responsible person
  • a service director

The responsible person and service director need to be 2 different people.

The payment service provider processes and stores the personal information you submit. GOV.UK Pay does not store it.

Providing personal information for these checks does not transfer your organisation's liability to the responsible person or service director. Liability remains with your organisation.

The checks on the responsible person and service director do not involve a hard credit search.

Responsible person

The responsible person should be:

  • authorised to sign contracts for your organisation
  • senior enough to access relevant customer files and records

They also need to be:

  • an employee of your organisation, not an external consultant
  • able to decide independently whether to report suspicious activity or transactions

Examples of appropriate roles include:

  • head of finance
  • finance director

You need to provide the responsible person's:

  • full name
  • date of birth
  • home address
  • work phone number
  • work email address

The payment service provider will use this information for:

  • electronic identity verification
  • sanctions screening
  • politically exposed person (PEP) screening

Service director

The service director needs to be either:

  • the director responsible for the service
  • another person at director level or in an equivalent position in your organisation

Examples of appropriate roles include:

  • chief executive officer
  • chief financial officer
  • chief operating officer

For organisations that formally delegate authority to staff, the service director can be a staff member at director level or equivalent whose role is set out in the scheme of delegation.

You need to provide the service director's:

  • full name
  • date of birth
  • home address
  • work email address