Regulatory compliance

SOAMTAR operates in Sierra Leone, with Orange Money Sierra Leone as its payment channel. This page sums up your obligations as a merchant, without disclosing sensitive details of our internal controls.

Scope

Every payment, transfer or holding of funds in leones (SLE) through SOAMTAR is in scope. This includes:

• Customer collections (online payments)
• Supplier payouts (outgoing transfers)
• Marketplace splits
• Refunds (credited back to the payer's Orange Money wallet)
• Temporary holding of funds before settlement

Out of scope: B2B invoices paid by direct bank transfer without SOAMTAR in between.

Merchant obligations

1. KYC suited to your business

Three progressive levels. Your business category determines the level you need; the dashboard guides you during onboarding. The limits attached to each level are shown once your account is activated.

You cannot operate in production without approved KYC.

2. Record keeping

SOAMTAR keeps your transactions for as long as the applicable regulations require. You must be able to produce any document requested by the competent authority, from the dashboard or the API.

3. Anti-money laundering (AML/CFT)

SOAMTAR automatically feeds the reporting channels required by regulations when the conditions are met.

You must:

• Never split payments to get around controls (this is an offence)
• Cooperate with SOAMTAR if one of your transactions is frozen for review
• Appoint an internal AML contact once your monthly volume becomes significant

4. Incident notification

Any security incident (confirmed fraud, data leak, critical outage) must be reported to the competent authority within the regulatory deadlines. SOAMTAR does this in its own name; you must tell us as soon as you detect an incident so the reporting chain can follow.

5. Informing the payer

Your terms of sale must state that payments are processed by SOAMTAR. Your privacy policy must state that payer data (phone number, name, amount) is shared with SOAMTAR.

Safeguarding of funds

Funds awaiting settlement are tracked in dedicated accounts, separate from operating funds, in line with payment service provider practice.

Compliance audits

The supervisory authority may audit you as well as SOAMTAR. To be ready:

• Keep a mapping table between your orders and SOAMTAR identifiers
• Be able to produce on request: the webhook payload received, the verified signature, your processing and the final status
• Keep your application logs for the period required by the regulations in force

Resources

• SOAMTAR compliance team: contact standard support