KYC for India

India does not let a company pay someone without knowing who they are. That means an Aadhaar number, a PAN tax number and a bank account, each checked against the issuing authority rather than just stored in a text field.

The checks were built into the India storefront's own plugin, alongside the rest of that market's rules: three forms, a client for the verification service behind them, and validation that runs as the customer types rather than after they submit. A failed check has to say which document failed and why, in a form someone will fill in once and never again.

It started at checkout, and that turned out to be the wrong place. Identity belongs where the account is created, not after money has moved, so in October 2024 the whole flow moved into the registration form. Address validation had to be switched off during it — the address printed on an identity document is not the address a parcel goes to, and the two were fighting each other.

Korea had the same problem two years earlier and got its own plugin for it in 2022, alongside the payment work in this list. Both have since been retired: the Korean one in November 2024, the Indian one that December, when the programmes behind them changed. Compliance code has a shelf life, and it is set by regulation rather than by the code.