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Banking Service

Obtaining supported banks

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Details of all calls can be found in API reference.

Identifying supported banks

The GET Banks endpoint identifies banks supported by the Banking Service. Use this unsecured endpoint to check your bank is supported before onboarding an Organisation and Company. This supports filtering in the style of OData, to help expose a manageable list of banks to the user.

Most supported countries have tens of banks however the United States have thousands, many of which are small regional banks.

Although a bank may appear in the list, it does not always mean the required type of bank account is supported. This is relative to the type and quality of the data source used for the bank.

Banks are categorised according to how a user account is set up. These categories are:

Direct banks

Direct banks are where the user requests directly with the bank for Banking Service to start receiving their transactions. Typically, this involves a PDF authorisation form being produced by our service. The user will then need to send this to the bank for the feed to start.

Lloyds, and RBS in the UK are examples of banks that we support in this manner. The majority of banks in the service, however, are indirect.

Indirect banks

Indirect refers to a process to authorise and onboard bank accounts through a UI flow. Historically, this often implied that users are authorising indirectly through another service.

The data sources for indirect banks can be:

  • Third party aggregator services such as Yodlee, Plaid or SISS. These may use a bank’s API or a screen scraping technique to source transaction data.
  • A category we label as ‘generic’. In this instance, onboarding is delegated through the Provider API to the data source.

Filters

Filters can be applied to bank calls to suit a range of needs. For example a startsWith filter can be used to allow a test search across banks:

GET {BANKING_SERVICE_URL}/banks?$filter=startswith(name,'HS') and dataProvider eq 'indirect' and primaryCountry eq 'GBR'

Top banks

Banking Service also maintains a list of Top 10 banks for each country. This feeds into the UI and encourages users to select these data sources.

Key Properties

The following bank properties are typically returned from bank calls:

  • BankId - ID for referring to he bank in other API requests.
  • Name - The name of the bank that is suitable for display on the UI and recognisable by the user.
  • Logo - Banking Service maintains an image for popular banks in this property.
  • BankUrl - When available, Banking Service captures the URL to the internet banking website to further aid identification of the user’s banks.
  • AccountTypes - Provides a data structure for direct banks, describing the bank account details and validation that are required to be captured by the product to onboard an account. This considers that names such as ‘Sort Code’ can be region specific.
  • DataProvider - Where a bank is direct or indirect, to indicate the flow to be used for creating bank accounts.

Additional information

  • Should a user discover their bank is not supported, they can request support be added using the POST BankSuggestions endpoint.
  • The available and top banks get added/updated on Banking Service on each release. For third-party aggregation services, scheduled tasks run to synchronise the current state of the available banks for aggregators every 24 hours.
  • More detailed endpoint information can be found in API reference