What it takes to be a WorkMate Pro

What it takes to be a WorkMate Pro

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.

What is required to take payments

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.

What is encouraged, and what each signal unlocks

Beyond the Stripe bar, our team can add a manual business-verification review for higher-trust placements — that is worth 10 points, bringing the compliance score to a maximum of 40 (30 for the Stripe bar, 10 for the manual review). The score is one of the inputs to where you rank in search results.

We used to let providers upload trade documents — public liability insurance, Safe Pass, a Tax Clearance Certificate — for extra points and profile badges, but that document-upload feature was retired in June 2026. It was partly a GDPR call (the fewer documents we hold, the fewer we have to defend, redact, or delete) and partly because Stripe's own verification already does the heavy lifting. Holding the right insurance and licences for your trade is still your responsibility — we simply no longer collect or score the certificates.

What we do not do

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.

A small number of trade documents uploaded before the feature was retired remain in storage under the retention rules set out in our data retention policy, and are being phased out; we do not accept new ones.

Why the bar is not higher

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.