I'm Oded Kovach, co-founder and CTO of UniPaaS, an FCA-authorised Payment Institution (No. 929994). paas.build is our product, so read everything below with that bias declared. This is the story of why we built it.
The company behind it
UniPaaS is not new. UNIPaaS Financial Services Ltd has been a registered UK company since 2019 (Companies House no. 12314440), is authorised by the FCA as a Payment Institution, and has processed embedded payments and payouts for UK software platforms since 2020. Settlement runs on J.P. Morgan banking rails. Client funds sit in safeguarded accounts, segregated from company money, as the Payment Services Regulations 2017 require. The founding team came out of SafeCharge, the payments company acquired for roughly $900M.
I put all of that first because the rest of this post describes something that sounds too fast to be legitimate, and the only honest way to open is to be checkable. Look us up yourself: register.fca.org.uk, search 929994.
What we kept watching
For years our customers were software platforms: established companies embedding payments for their users. Then who builds software changed. People started shipping working apps with Lovable, Bolt, Cursor or Claude Code in a weekend - real apps, real users - and then hit a wall that has nothing to do with code.
The pattern repeats:
- A Merchant of Record rejects them. It is not personal. An MoR becomes the legal seller of your product, so its risk team owns your risk, and a thin trading history in an AI-adjacent category is an easy decline.
- Stripe-style onboarding assumes an established company. No company, no account.
- Forming a company just to find out whether anyone will pay £9/month is backwards.
We call this the KYB wall. Know Your Business checks were designed to run all upfront: company number, documents, directors, trading history, then a review queue measured in days. That model fits businesses that already exist on paper. The new builders exist in a repo.
Progressive KYB
The fix was not new rails - ours have run since 2020. It was re-sequencing verification.
Progressive KYB verifies in stages instead of all upfront. An individual or sole trader in the UK, EU or US gets a live merchant account the same day, capped at £1,500 until verification completes. Then the cap lifts. The cap is not fine print we bury; it is the regulated mechanism that makes same-day onboarding legal and safe: bounded exposure while the checks run, full verification before the account scales.
We state the cap proudly for a reason. On a payments product, "instant, no checks" should scare you. "Instant, capped, checks staged" is a different sentence.
The agent part
The second thing we noticed: the new builders often are not filling in forms at all. Their coding agent does the work. So we exposed onboarding the way agents consume things - as tools, not screens.
paas.build runs an MCP server with three tools: identify_business, go_live, create_checkout. An agent connects, identifies the business, opens a real account and returns a payable checkout link. One prompt end to end. We recorded an unedited, timestamped session of exactly this happening and published the raw log at paas.build/demo - the vendorId in it is real. Judge it yourself.
To try it: claude mcp add paas-build -- npx -y @paasbuild/mcp, or POST to https://paas.build/mcp directly.
The honest boundaries
- We are a payment facilitator, not a Merchant of Record. You stay the merchant: your brand on the checkout, your customer - and your tax. If you want global VAT/GST handled for you, Paddle is genuinely the better pick, and we say so on our own pages.
- UK, EU and US businesses only for now. Buyers can pay from anywhere.
- £1,500 cap until verification clears.
- 3.9% flat, no fixed fee. On a $9 subscription that is 35c, against 95c at a typical 5% + $0.50 MoR. Fixed fees are what kill small tickets.
Why write this at all
Because a payments domain you have never heard of claiming "live account today" pattern-matches to fraud, and it should. The counter is not louder copy. It is a named human, a regulator's register entry you can search, and a reproducible session log. That is what we have.
Questions - ask me directly at paas.build/contact. I am the CTO, so the answer is real, not a form.
Top comments (1)
fwiw i work on affiliate payouts on stripe, so this is my corner of it. the payouts half is the part people underestimate. accepting money is basically solved now, stripe/adyen turned it into a weekend project. paying money OUT to lots of parties, with KYC on each recipient, cross-border, and reconciliation that survives a refund clawback, is where it gets genuinely hard, and where most "embedded payments" stories quietly stop.
curious how you handle recipient onboarding friction at scale. the platform always wants instant payouts, but the compliance step on each individual payee is usually the wall.