Three names in every China purchase: the entity on the contract, the entity on the invoice, the name on the bank account. When they match, the paperwork is a formality. When they don't, everything you thought you bought depends on who actually received your money.
Buyers spend hours on specifications and molds and price negotiations, and about ninety seconds on the payment route. The supplier sends bank details on a letterhead-styled PDF, the accounts team wires the deposit, the deal moves. The details of whose account received the money feel like plumbing.
They are not plumbing. They are the answer to the only question that matters when a transaction goes wrong: who do you sue, and what does the money trail prove you bought? I have handled enough disputes where the payment route was the trap — laid months earlier, at the moment the first deposit moved — to treat the account name as a primary risk item, not a clerical one.
This article gives you the test I apply, the risk profile of each common mismatch, and the line between a mismatch with a reasonable explanation and a mismatch that means stop the wire.
Every purchase from a Chinese supplier produces three names:
The test is simple: all three must be the same registered legal entity. Not a similar name. Not a group company. Not an affiliate "under the same boss." The same entity, matching the registered name on the business license — and for wires into China, the account should be denominated to receive foreign exchange and match the name character for character in the bank's records.
Why so strict? Because in a dispute, your claim lives on the contracting entity. If you sue the company that chopped the contract but paid a different company, the paid entity will say: we received nothing under this contract; the plaintiff's contract is with someone else. The contracting entity will say: we never received payment, so we had no obligation to ship. Both statements can be individually true. You bought from one balance sheet and paid another, and reconciling the two in litigation costs time and money that a five-minute check would have preserved.
The starkest mismatch is a wire to an individual. It arrives dressed up: the "boss's personal account because the company account is under review," a card number for a WeChat or Alipay transfer "for small amounts," the owner's relative named as payee "for convenience."
The risk profile is almost uniformly bad:
Treat any request to pay a personal account as presumptively disqualifying. Genuine, established manufacturers do not need your deposit to arrive at the chairman's private card.
The subtler version: bank details in Hong Kong SAR, Singapore, the UAE, or elsewhere — an account held by a company that is not your contracting counterparty. The explanation sounds sophisticated: "our group's HK company handles all FX collection," "faster settlement, fewer intermediary charges." Sometimes that is even true.
Here is what the route changes. Your contract, warranty, and quality claims sit with the mainland operating company — the entity with the factory, the chop, the export license. Your money sits with an offshore vehicle you have never contractually touched. That vehicle may be a genuine treasury arm of the group. It may also be a one-week-old shell with a nominee director, opened precisely so that if the transaction sours, the money is already one jurisdiction ahead of any Chinese court order.
The diagnostic questions are few and concrete: Does the offshore entity appear anywhere in the contract? Is there a written, chopped acknowledgment from the mainland company that payment to the offshore account discharges your payment obligation under the contract? Who are the beneficial owners of the offshore entity — the same people as the mainland company, or someone else? If those answers are clean and documented, the route may be workable. If the answers are evasive — "it's normal, all our customers pay this way" — you have your answer about the counterparty, just earlier than you would have liked.
The third mismatch has a genuinely legitimate core, which is what makes it dangerous: the export agency structure. Many Chinese factories lack their own import-export rights or FX collection channels, so an export agent (出口代理) contracts with you, collects your payment, and procures the goods from the factory behind the scenes. The entity on the contract, the invoice, and the account is the agent — consistently. The factory is invisible to you.
Consistency is the tell. In a genuine agency structure, the agent is all three names — contract, invoice, payee match, and the agent's registration, export history, and standing are all verifiable. The structure has real risks (your quality claims run against an intermediary, not the maker), but they are visible risks you can price and paper around — agency agreements, declarations, back-to-back documentation.
The trap is the incoherent version: the factory signs the contract and stamps the PI, but the payee is a trading company you've never heard of; or the trading company contracts, but the payee is the factory's sister company. Nobody can produce a document explaining the chain. That is not an export agency structure. That is a payment route that exists because somebody along the line cannot or will not receive money in the name that signs your papers — and each of those reasons is bad for you in a different way.
An anonymized version of a matter on this site (the excavator dispute) shows the endpoint of a payment route allowed to drift. A French buyer paid in full for excavators from a Chinese supplier. The supplier — structured as a one-person company, a form where the boundary between company assets and the owner's personal assets is thin by design — then withheld the goods and demanded further payments through late-stage surcharges. The buyer had paid everything and held nothing but a contract against an entity with minimal assets on its own name.
The recovery in that case came from method: evidence locked first (the supplier's own messages and invoices, including an offer in writing to tamper with hour meters), the entity structure identified as the pressure point, and a bilingual demand letter over the table with the facts pinned. The letter worked within the week. But note what the payment route had already done: it positioned the buyer, for the entire dispute, as an unsecured creditor of a hollow entity. The outcome was good because the response was fast and deliberate — not because the structure was safe. Structured differently at the payment stage, the dispute never needs a lawyer at all.
Not every mismatch is fraud. The workable test, distilled from matters where the answer went both ways:
| Signal | Reasonable | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| Documentation | Written, chopped acknowledgment from the contracting entity that the payee collects on its behalf and payment discharges your obligation | Verbal assurance, WeChat message from a salesperson, "all customers pay this" |
| Chain coherence | Export agency structure: same entity on contract/invoice/account, agent verifiable | Factory signs, unrelated trading company collects — or vice versa, with no papered chain |
| Payee profile | Group treasury arm, same beneficial owners, registered for years | Freshly incorporated offshore shell, nominee directors, no web footprint |
| Timing of the request | Payment route disclosed in the contract before signature | New bank details produced after signature — especially a "changed account" email right before the balance |
| Your leverage after paying | You can still name and reach a solvent entity holding your money or your goods | Contract entity has no assets; money sits elsewhere; both claim the other owes you |
The last row is the heart of it. A payment route is acceptable exactly when, after the wire, there is one solvent, reachable entity that plainly owes you performance. Everything else is fragmentation — and fragmentation is what a counterparty in distress, or a counterparty planning distress, needs from you.
All of the above is checkable in advance, which is what makes inexcusable after the fact. A supplier verification ties the payment route to the registry: the contracting entity's business license and registration status, the legal representative, shareholders, the relationship (or non-relationship) between the contracting entity and the payee, export credentials where relevant. The full method is described in the verification guide — and the account name is one of the highest-yield items in the whole exercise, because a payee that cannot be connected to the contracting entity ends most deals on the spot, at the cost of a few days instead of a lawsuit.
One operational habit to adopt this week: make the bank details a contractual annex, chopped by the payee entity, with a clause that payments are only discharged to that account and that any change requires a re-issued, chopped annex delivered through a verified channel. Business email compromise increasingly targets exactly this seam — a "updated account details" email before the balance wire — and the clause plus the process is what defeats it.
Before the next wire to China:
The account name test takes minutes. The alternative — discovering in a dispute that you bought from one company and paid another — takes a year and rarely ends as well.
This article is general information, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney–client relationship. Outcomes vary by case; nothing here is a guarantee of results.
Send me the contract, the invoice header, and the account name before you wire. We'll trace the entities behind all three names — and tell you whether the route has a legitimate explanation or is the trap itself.
Verify the payee