Security·3 min read·12 May 2026
What it takes to be a WorkMate Pro
The compliance bar for providers — what is required, what is encouraged, and how each signal moves you up in search results.
By Oguzhan
The compliance bar for providers — what is required, what is encouraged, and how each signal moves you up in search results.
By Oguzhan
The point of a marketplace is that customers do not need to do background checks before they hire. The platform does. Here is how that actually works on WorkMate — what you have to show us, what is optional, and what raises your visibility.
Before you can accept jobs and receive payments, you go through Stripe Connect KYC — Stripe's own identity, business legal, and bank ownership verification. It happens inside Stripe's onboarding flow, not WorkMate's. We do not see your passport or your bank statements; Stripe does, under their regulated infrastructure.
Once your Stripe account is "charges enabled", you are cleared to take work. That is the minimum bar, and it is also the 30-point bucket on your compliance score.
Beyond the Stripe bar, four further trust signals can be added to your profile. Uploading them is not gated — you can take jobs without — but each one increases your compliance score, which is one of the inputs to provider ranking in search results.
Public liability insurance at a minimum cover of €6.5M adds 20 points. This is the signal that says your customer is protected if something goes wrong on a job. It is not a legal requirement for tradespeople in Ireland, but for high-value jobs or commercial customers it is often expected.
Safe Pass adds 20 points and signals that you have completed the construction industry's mandatory safety induction. It is relevant for any work on construction sites.
Tax Clearance Certificate plus a valid CRO number adds 20 points and signals that you are current with Revenue.
Manual business verification adds a further 10 points and is reviewed by our team for high-trust placements.
A perfect 100 places you at the top of the search results in your category and area. Most tradespeople starting out land in the 30-50 range and add documents over their first few months. That is normal.
We do not manually inspect personal ID photos. We do not ask for "proof of address" or utility bills. We do not store passport scans. GDPR is not just a compliance box for us — it is a design constraint. Every piece of personal data we hold is something we would have to defend, redact, or delete on request, and personal-identity papers are the last category we want sitting in a database.
The exception is when you yourself upload an optional trust document. Insurance certificates and Safe Pass cards are document-class data; we keep them under the retention rules set out in our data retention policy.
About the author
Oguzhan
Founder, WorkMate. Building a transparent services marketplace in Ireland.
Product
A founder note on the gap in Irish services marketplaces and what we are choosing to optimise for.
Payments
What the Irish Consumer Rights Act 2022 cooling-off period means before you accept a quote, after you accept one, and once work has started.
A higher bar — mandatory insurance, mandatory tax clearance, mandatory trade qualifications — would lock out the long tail of perfectly capable tradespeople who do not yet have all of those things. The compliance score lets customers self-select by trust signal without us turning into a bouncer at the door.
If you are shopping for a high-stakes job (electrics, gas, large building works), filter by compliance score. If you are booking a one-off small job, the basic Stripe-verified bar may be all you need.