Who can collect payments

WhileSmart Pay is built for merchants: anyone collecting payment for goods or services they supply. You do not need to be a registered company. Individual traders, freelancers, and one-person operations are as welcome here as incorporated businesses.

What matters is not how you are registered, but whether the person paying receives something in return: a product, a booking, a job, a subscription. Every payment link should correspond to something you supply.

We are not a way to move money between people. If nothing is being supplied to the person paying, the collection does not belong on this platform.

What we support

• Individuals selling goods or services on their own account: market traders, online sellers, tailors, mechanics, tutors, drivers.
• Freelancers and professionals invoicing clients for work they carry out.
• Registered businesses selling physical goods, digital products, or services.
• Bookings, deposits, and instalments against a specific order or service.
• Subscriptions and recurring fees for an ongoing service.

What we don't support

• Person-to-person transfers, including sending money to friends, family, or yourself.
• Collections between individuals where nothing is supplied in return.
• Informal group collections: contribution circles, savings groups, passing a hat for someone.
• Personal fundraising, whether for yourself or on behalf of someone else.
• Collecting on behalf of someone else, or for a trading name that is not the one verified on your account.

Mobile money already handles person-to-person payments well, and it handles them for free. Routing them through a merchant platform adds cost for the payer and gives us no way to help either side when something goes wrong.

Donations, dues, and fees

Registered organizations, including schools, churches, associations, and non-profits, may be approved to collect donations, membership dues, tuition, and similar payments even though no goods change hands.

This is granted by our compliance team after reviewing evidence that the organization is registered and that you are authorized to collect on its behalf. Write to compliance@whilesmart.com before you start collecting, not after.

It is not available to individuals collecting on their own behalf, or to groups with no registered legal entity behind them. The distinction is the organization, not the cause.

This is the one case where registration matters. If you are selling something, you can trade as an individual and no registration is required. If you are collecting where nothing is supplied in return, there has to be a registered organization behind it, because the registration is the only thing standing in for the goods.

Restricted categories

Some activities need our written consent before you start collecting, and some we cannot serve at all, either because of the law or because our mobile money and card partners forbid it. This includes gambling without a license, adult content, unlicensed financial services, and anything restricted by the networks we settle through. This applies whether you trade as a company or on your own account.

If you are unsure whether what you sell fits, ask before you build. Finding out at your first payout is worse for both of us.

How we enforce this

Payment links are reviewed, and anyone who pays through one can report it. Where a collection falls outside this policy we may suspend the account, hold the funds it has collected, and return them to the people who paid.

Funds collected on WhileSmart Pay are held for a period before they can be withdrawn, which is what gives us room to act on a report before money leaves the platform. That is covered in the payouts and holding period policy.

Questions

If you are not sure whether what you are collecting for is supported, ask first: compliance@whilesmart.com.