Most teams building in regulated industries end up stitching together the same fragmented stack: a payment processor that won't serve their vertical, a separate KYC vendor, a fraud tool, a billing system, a payouts provider, and a layer of compliance workflows holding it all together. It's slow to launch, expensive to maintain, and every vendor boundary is a place where risk can fall through.

frameOS replaces that stack. It's infrastructure for regulated money movement — a unified layer that handles payments and payouts, identity and compliance, and fraud and risk operations in a single platform. Platforms using frameOS can onboard users, move money, and stay compliant without adding more vendors.

frameOS is purpose-built for complex, high-compliance verticals where a standard payment processor alone isn't enough: gambling, crypto, telemedicine, alcohol, cannabis, tobacco, and other regulated industries. In these verticals, compliance isn't a separate concern layered on top of payments — it's load-bearing. frameOS treats it that way.

Who should use frameOS

frameOS is built for teams where payments and compliance are the same problem — and where getting either one wrong has real consequences.

Businesses and merchants in regulated verticals — frameOS is built for teams operating in industries where standard processors fall short: gambling, crypto, telemedicine, alcohol, cannabis, tobacco, and other high-compliance spaces. If your business has been turned away by mainstream PSPs, underserved by their compliance capabilities, or forced to bolt on third-party vendors just to stay compliant, frameOS is designed for exactly that situation. You get modern payment infrastructure and deep compliance tooling in a single platform, purpose-built for the rules and risk profiles of your vertical.

Developers and engineering teams — frameOS is built for teams that are tired of owning the integration surface between a processor, a KYC vendor, a fraud tool, and a billing system. With frameOS, you integrate once against a single API. Compliance capabilities are configured on accounts and enforced automatically — no glue code, no cross-vendor data pipelines, no compliance logic scattered across your stack. The Frame API is designed for developers building complex, regulated financial workflows who need control without the operational overhead of a fragmented vendor stack.

Partners, ISOs, and platforms embedding payments — frameOS is built for ISOs, ISVs, and software platforms that need to offer payment and compliance capabilities to merchants in regulated industries. If your merchant base includes businesses that mainstream processors won't touch, frameOS gives you the infrastructure to serve them — with the compliance depth they require and the white-label flexibility you need to embed it as your own. See the partner documentation for details on how to resell and embed frameOS capabilities.

If you have straightforward payment needs without regulatory or compliance requirements, see our guide on accepting payments to get up and running quickly.

What frameOS replaces

Rather than integrating and maintaining each of these independently, frameOS provides them as a unified infrastructure layer:

The result: faster time to launch and meaningfully lower operational and regulatory risk than managing these pieces across separate vendors.

How frameOS is organized

Everything in frameOS is built around the concept of accounts. An account represents a merchant, platform, or user entity on your system — and it's the unit through which frameOS capabilities are configured, activated, and enforced.

When you create an account, you define which capabilities it has access to. Capabilities map directly to the three layers of frameOS:

This model means compliance isn't a separate flow you trigger after onboarding — it's baked into how the account is configured from the start. An account for a gambling merchant might have age verification and geocompliance capabilities activated before it's ever permitted to process a charge. A telemedicine platform might require FSA/HSA card verification as part of its billing capability. The capabilities on an account define what it's allowed to do and what checks run automatically when it does.

Accounts can represent your own platform, your merchants, or end users depending on how your integration is structured. See the accounts documentation and onboarding for details on account types and how to configure capabilities during or after onboarding.

The three capability layers are:

Money movement — Accept payments, issue payouts, and manage complex multi-party flows across cards, ACH, and push-to-debit rails. Handles the full lifecycle from checkout to settlement to reconciliation.

Identity & compliance — KYC/KYB, age verification, geofencing, address verification, and bank account verification, built directly into the financial services relationship rather than bolted on. Vertical-specific compliance rules deepen as Frame adds coverage for each industry.

Risk & operations — Fraud detection, chargeback defense, dispute management, and billing operations running alongside every transaction automatically.

frameOS products

Each product below maps to one or more capabilities that can be enabled on an account. Pick what your use case requires — frameOS handles the rest, whether you're building a marketplace, subscription platform, crypto exchange, or anything in between.

Frame gives you multiple paths to go live, so you can move fast without sacrificing flexibility.

Use hosted onboarding sessions to configure frameOS and define the products you need without writing significant amounts of code. For payments, drop in the hosted checkout to get up and running quickly, or build a fully custom flow using the Frame API. You can also mix and match — using hosted flows for one part of your workflow and connecting directly to the API for another.

The right integration path depends on a few things:

• How much control you need over the look and feel of your user experience
• The nature of money movement on your platform, such as repeat versus one-time customers and which payment rails your customers use
• How your business handles reporting and billing
• Whether your team is set up to handle sensitive payment data

Note that our authentication protocol differs depending on how you are integrating. We require API keys for server-side integrations, while client-side integrations like Frame.js use publishable keys.

Frame.js

Frame.js is a frontend library built for PCI-compliant payment collection and real-time transaction monitoring. Use it to drop pre-built UI components into your checkout flow without building from scratch.

View the Frame.js documentation.

API

For full control over your integration, use the Frame API directly.

Create an account

Accounts are created either via the API or through Frame's hosted onboarding flow. Both paths let you select capabilities upfront, pre-fill known data, and configure compliance requirements before the account is permitted to transact. See the onboarding documentation for details.