Concepts

Principal. The legal entity whose money it is, for example a company.

Authorizer. The person who delegated authority, for example the CFO. A mandate names them.

Agent. The software that asks to pay. Each version of an agent is a different actor: version 3.7 can be allowed while 3.8 is not, until a mandate lists it.

Financial Mandate. The delegation of authority in a machine-readable form: which agent versions, which accounts and currencies, which beneficiary countries and payment types, limits per payment, per day and per month, the approval threshold and the validity period. A mandate has versions, and a version never changes; a change creates the next version. The format is Polivor's own, described in Mandates.

Policy. Rules in Cedar that turn the facts about a request into a decision. Policies can use agent-supplied signals only to restrict (in forbid rules), never to allow. Polivor computes the decisive facts itself: whether the beneficiary is on the allowlist, whether the IBAN matches, the budget left, and whether the agent version is authorized.

Beneficiary allowlist. The payees a tenant has approved, with their IBANs. A request for an unknown payee or a changed IBAN does not get an automatic ALLOW.

Budget. Daily and monthly limits per mandate. Allowing a payment reserves the amount, atomically, so concurrent requests cannot overspend. A payment reported REJECTED, FAILED or marked not executed gives the amount back.

Decision. The stored result of one authorize call: outcome, reasons, the list of checks that ran, and references to the mandate and policy version used. The request is POST /v1/authorize; the decision is what is stored.

Authorization. A short-lived signed token (JWS) issued on ALLOW. It names the exact action, the agent version, the mandate version and the policy version, and expires after 5 minutes.

Enforcement point. The system that actually releases funds: a payment hub, a payment run in an ERP, an execution platform. It verifies the authorization before it releases and reports the outcome afterwards.

Evidence record. A signed entry, chained to the one before it by hash, written for every decision and every state change. Together they form a log that shows if anyone altered a byte.

What Polivor does not do

It does not initiate payments, call banks or hold payment credentials. It does not use machine learning to decide: decisions are deterministic, and the same input with the same mandate and policy gives the same answer. It does not trust the agent for facts that matter.