A PayFac (payment facilitator) is a company that onboards merchants as sub-merchants under its own master merchant account, letting them accept payments quickly while the PayFac handles underwriting, compliance and payouts. Unlike a Merchant of Record, the sub-merchant remains the legal seller — their name on the receipt, their customer relationship.
Both remove payments friction, but they differ on one question: who is the seller? With a PayFac, you are — your brand on the statement, your customer data, your pricing. With an MoR (Paddle, Lemon Squeezy), the provider is the legal seller: simpler tax, but it owns the transaction and cannot move money between your users.
A traditional merchant account means underwriting queues, integration work and weeks of setup. A PayFac compresses that to minutes-to-days, because you ride on infrastructure that is already approved and regulated.
A PayFac is the only model where a platform can onboard its own users and split payments to them — the "your users get paid too" pattern behind marketplaces and communities. paas.build is a PayFac built on UniPaaS (FCA-authorised): one prompt creates a real sub-merchant account, live the same day, 3.9% flat.
Stripe operates PayFac-style infrastructure (and lets platforms build on it via Connect), but assembling platform payments there is your engineering project. A productised PayFac like paas.build ships onboarding, splits and payouts built-in.
The facilitator holds the regulatory status — paas.build runs on UniPaaS, an FCA-authorised payment institution (No. 929994) — so sub-merchants inherit a compliant framework with caps and monitoring.
On paas.build: the same session — a real capped account with background verification (progressive KYB), instead of a multi-day review.