Supporting EEA Customers: Enhanced Verification For Individuals

Sphere now supports enhanced verification requirements for individual customers based in the European Economic Area, in line with European regulatory requirements under MiCA. This update lets you onboard and serve EEA-resident individuals while meeting the additional data standards European regulation requires — with a small, well-defined set of changes to your integration.

What's changing

For individual customers resident in the EEA+ region — the European Economic Area plus the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Andorra, and several EU overseas territories (Åland Islands, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, Réunion, Saint Martin) — Sphere now collects three additional data points before the customer can be verified:

FieldWhat it isaccountPurposeThe purpose of the account (new field)countryOfBirthISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code of the customer's country of birthnationalityISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code of the customer's nationality

Whether a customer is in scope is determined by their residence country (address.country). Customers outside the EEA+ region are unaffected, and no existing fields were removed or renamed — this is a fully backwards-compatible addition.

What you need to implement

All three fields live under personalInformation on POST /v2/customer and PATCH /v2/customer/{id}.

1. Collect and submit the three fields for EEA+ individuals

accountPurpose accepts the following values: personal_or_living_expenses, payments_to_friends_or_family_abroad, receive_salary, receive_payment_for_freelancing, protect_wealth, purchase_goods_and_services, charitable_donations, ecommerce_retail_payments, investment_purposes, operating_a_company.

POST /v2/customer
{
 "type": "individual",
 "firstName": "Anna",
 "lastName": "Lindqvist",
 "address": { "country": "SWE" },
 "personalInformation": {
   "countryOfBirth": "FIN",
   "nationality": "SWE",
   "accountPurpose": "receive_salary"
 }
}


2. Watch the verification profile for the new requirement codes

The fields are not hard-required at creation — POST /v2/customer and PATCH /v2/customer/{id} succeed without them, so you can collect the data in whatever order suits your onboarding flow. Until all three are supplied, they appear in the customer's kyc_profile_a verification profile criteria as:

• country_of_birth
• nationality
• account_purpose

While any of these codes remain outstanding, the customer cannot be submitted for verification. The codes resolve as soon as the corresponding field is supplied, and they never appear for customers outside the EEA+ region.

If you use Sphere's hosted verification links

No changes are required. The hosted flow collects the new data points automatically for EEA+ residents.

Questions?

The full field reference is in the API documentation, and the requirement codes are documented on the verification profile page. If you have questions about how this affects your integration, reach out to your Sphere point of contact or support@spherepay.co.