Terms of service

1. Who we are

Stratum (also Stratum APIs) is a trading name of Amir Naghieh, a sole trader. "Stratum", "we" and "us" mean Amir Naghieh trading as Stratum, the operator of stratumapis.com, the Stratum app and its APIs. Our address is on the legal information page. You can reach us at support@stratumapis.com.

2. The service

Stratum is a client register for regulated UK firms, with checks on your clients (sanctions, PEP, companies and the people behind them), daily monitoring, and the records your supervisor asks to see. It also offers programmatic access to the same checks and to verification APIs built on UK public data.

You pay in the ways set out on the pricing page and in the price you agree at checkout: a membership for the register, paid monthly or yearly and sized by how many clients you keep; or pay per call from Stratum credit for the API (each single API, the transactions API and its suites). A monthly plan for a single API that you already hold carries on as agreed. A different arrangement applies only where we agree it in writing.

3. Your account and your team

Your firm’s owner decides who is in your firm and what each person may do (owner, member or look-only), and you are responsible for what your team does in Stratum. Keep sign-in details and API keys confidential. We only ever store the hash of an API key, so a lost key cannot be recovered, only revoked and reissued; you are responsible for use of a key issued to you until you revoke it.

You must be at least 18 and authorised to accept these terms for the firm using the service.

4. Your clients’ data

When you keep your clients in Stratum, you are the controller of their personal data and we are your processor. Our data processing terms form part of these terms.

5. Acceptable use

Your use of the service is also governed by our acceptable use policy. We may suspend or end your access without notice if we reasonably believe your use breaches it or risks the service or its data sources.

6. Fees, billing and refunds

Membership fees are charged in advance through Stripe, monthly or yearly as you choose (yearly is ten months’ price). Every plan has a monthly allowance of checks (a check is one client checked in full); each check beyond it is charged at your plan’s price for an extra check and added to your next bill (on a yearly plan, a bill each month). All prices are in pounds and are the price you pay: we are not registered for VAT, so none is added. If that changes we will tell you before any price changes.

You can change or cancel your plan at any time in Settings. A bigger plan starts at once and the difference for the rest of the period is charged then; a smaller plan starts at once and what is left of the bigger one comes off your next bill. A smaller plan must hold the clients you keep. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for (the month, or the year); we do not refund unused time within it. We may refund a recent charge you believe was made in error: write to support@stratumapis.com. If a payment fails, Stripe tries it again over the following days and Settings shows it; if it still fails, the plan ends and client checks and the daily watch stop. Your clients stay in your register.

Stratum credit. Credit bought by card is spent on checks charged per use, at the prices shown before each check runs. Credit is held in pounds, used at face value and never expires. A check that does not run is not charged, or is refunded to your credit. Unused credit is refunded on request within 30 days of purchase.

7. Service availability

We aim for 99.9% monthly uptime. The service runs on Amazon Web Services in London and Cloudflare, and we check it every five minutes. This is a target, not a guarantee: no plan includes an uptime guarantee or service credits. Planned maintenance, events beyond our control, and outages at data sources (Companies House, the FCA, the sanctions list publishers and similar) are not counted against it.

8. Data, sources and your decisions

Our checks use data from UK regulators and public bodies, owned by those bodies. We make reasonable efforts to keep results accurate and current, but we do not warrant that they are free from errors, complete, or fit for a particular purpose. A part of a check whose source can’t be reached says “not checked” and is not charged.

Stratum suggests; your firm decides. You decide each possible match and each client’s risk, and make any report. Your firm remains responsible for meeting its own duties (including under the Money Laundering Regulations). Our guidance, risk assessment drafts, policies and alerts help you do that; they are not legal advice and do not move your regulatory responsibility to us.

9. Intellectual property

Stratum’s software, brand, documentation and schemas are ours. You may use the results, certificates and documents Stratum produces in your own work and records for as long as you need. You may not resell raw API responses as a competing dataset or API, or use them to train a model meant to replicate the service.

10. Confidentiality

Both of us will keep confidential any non-public information shared while using the service, including your API keys and pricing we agree that is not published.

11. Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you under or in connection with these terms is capped at the fees you paid in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim. We are not liable for indirect, special or consequential loss, or for lost profits, business or data.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that UK law does not allow to be limited, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence or for fraudulent misrepresentation.

12. Ending these terms

Either of us may end these terms on 30 days’ notice. We may end them at once for a material breach (including of the acceptable use policy, or not paying) or to comply with the law. Your clients’ data is then handled as section 7 of the data processing terms says, and your own account data as our privacy notice says.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Material changes are emailed to the address on your account at least 30 days before they take effect. Using the service after that date means you accept them.

14. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, whose courts have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising under or in connection with them.

15. Contact

Commercial questions: support@stratumapis.com. Data protection: dpo@stratumapis.com.