# Shieldpay

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/shieldpay/  
**Website:** https://shieldpay.com/  
**APIs profiled:** 1

Shieldpay is an FCA-authorised (firm reference 770210) payments platform built for the UK legal and professional-services sector, offering a regulated alternative to holding client money in traditional client accounts. It combines KYC/due-diligence verification of parties, safeguarding of funds with tier-1 banking partners (Citi and ClearBank), and audited disbursement of payments, supporting M&A holdbacks/earnouts and shareholder distributions, multi-claimant litigation settlements, escrow, conveyancing, and ongoing client-money management via its Third-Party Managed Account (TPMA) service. Shieldpay has processed over £18 billion and serves 40+ of the UK top-100 law firms. Its Partner API lets integrators programmatically create projects, manage payers and payees, run KYC, and authorise payments; the API secures every request with mutual TLS, an API key, an RSA-SHA256 request signature, a v4-UUID RequestID for idempotency, and IP whitelisting, and delivers real-time events over webhooks.

## Kin Score — 51.8 / 100 (developing)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+1.1 from 50.7).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 87.0 |
| Contract Quality | 45.1 |
| Governance | 18.2 |
| Contract Governance | 18.2 |
| Operational Transparency | 36.8 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 64.3 |
| Commercial Clarity | 43.4 |
| Access Clarity | 43.4 |

Regulatory layer — **Banking & Open Finance**: 53.2 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 38.9 (agent-ready)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | yes |
| Idempotency | documented |
| Error Semantics | documented |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | no |
| Event Surface Described | yes |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | yes |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Self-serve signup — onboarding: self-serve, pricing: unknown, trial: no (confidence: medium).

## APIs (1)

- **Shieldpay Partner API** — REST API to manage payment workflows end to end — create projects, manage payers and payees, run KYC verification, and authorise payments to disburse funds securely. Secured wit...

## Security (4)

- **Shieldpay Authentication** — mutualTLS/apiKey/requestSignature · 4 schemes
- **Shieldpay Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC
- **Shieldpay Vulnerability Disclosure** — security.txt · contact published
- **Shieldpay Trust Center** — ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials, FIPS 140-2

## Tags

Company, Payments, Escrow, Legal Technology, Fintech, Compliance, KYC, Banking

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/shieldpay/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.