Overview

A payee is the recipient of a payout. You create a payee once with their identity and payment details, then reference them by ID whenever you send a payout. Anton supports two payee types: individuals and businesses.

Individual vs. Business Payees

Choose the right type based on who you are paying:

Individual -- Use when paying a person such as a freelancer, contractor, employee, or refund customer.
Business -- Use when paying a company such as a supplier, vendor, or partner.

Required Fields

The fields you need to provide differ by payee type:

Individual Payees

type -- Set to individual
first_name -- The person's first name
last_name -- The person's last name
country -- Two-letter ISO country code (e.g., US, GB)
email -- (Recommended) Used for delivery notifications

Business Payees

type -- Set to business
company_name -- The registered business name
country -- Two-letter ISO country code
email -- (Recommended) Used for delivery notifications

Creating a Payee in the Merchant Portal

In the merchant portal, navigate to Payees and click Add Payee. Select the payee type (Individual or Business), fill in the required fields, and optionally attach payment instrument details. Click Create to save.

Creating a Payee via the API

Send a POST request to /v1/payees with the payee details in the request body.

Create an individual payee:

curl https://api.antonpayments.dev/v1/payees \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_test_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "type": "individual",
    "first_name": "Jane",
    "last_name": "Smith",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "country": "GB"
  }'

Create a business payee:

curl https://api.antonpayments.dev/v1/payees \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_test_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "type": "business",
    "company_name": "Acme Corp",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "country": "US"
  }'

A successful response returns the new payee object with an id (e.g., pye_cng3q8s6ek9kc5qg1h1g) that you use to reference this payee in future payouts.

Payee Verification

In production, payees undergo automatic compliance screening when first used in a payout. This includes name matching against the bank account holder, sanctions screening (OFAC, PEP, and global lists), and destination country checks. No separate verification call is needed.

Best Practices

Create one payee per recipient. Use instruments to add multiple payment methods to a single payee.
Always include an email address so Anton can send delivery notifications.
Store a mapping between your internal user or vendor IDs and Anton payee IDs for easy reconciliation.
Validate bank details early by creating payees before you need to send time-sensitive payments.

Adding a Payee