Balance Insights for Money Movement

You need to move money, but with that comes risk. How do you know a customer has enough funds available in their account? The answer: balance checks. With balance checks, you can guarantee that a customer has sufficient funds to facilitate confident money movement. And with live balance checks, you can get the most accurate, most up-to-date account information. Let’s dig deeper into how that works.

What Are Balance Checks?

Many payment solutions rely on balance checks to ensure that an account has the funds necessary to make a payment. For card payments, this comes in the form of a network authorization. For ACH transfers, balance checks help mitigate financial risks like payment failures, overdraft fees, and NSF fees, all of which can happen if an account holder tries to move money they don’t have. 

Why Implement Balance Checks?

Balance checks deliver visibility into a customer’s bank account balance so payment facilitators can move money confidently and mitigate risk. Implementing balance checks into your workflow can produce benefits like:

• Streamlined payment experiences
• Reduced ACH payment errors
• Higher rate of payment success
• Mitigate money lost due to payment failures
• Better decision-making thanks to more accurate, up-to-date data
• Improved consumer experience with fewer fees and more successful payments
  

Altogether, balance checks help payment facilitators build better experiences for consumers that in turn yield better business outcomes.

How Finicity Enables Live Balance Checks for Streamlined, Lower-risk Account Funding

As part of our Finicity Pay solution set, we offer several balance check options so that payment facilitators can enhance the payment experience and move money confidently. Some balance checks are cached, meaning that you receive lightning fast account balance data with timestamps. For the greatest accuracy, live balance checks deliver real-time, instant balance information at the moment of the request. This might be ideal for higher value or riskier payments.

Our live balance call delivers real-time balance information (both cleared balance and available balance) complete with time stamps directly from a consumer’s financial institution. And thanks to the speed of our high-quality data connections, you can get that important balance information in seconds.

For use cases that may not require a live balance check, we also offer balance checks that occur throughout the day at regular intervals so you can retrieve lightning fast results.

These balance check solutions rely on our open banking platform, which is founded on secure data connections that ensure a seamless, low-friction experience, and consumers permissioning their data for their use. At Finicity, we empower the consumer to benefit from their financial data. That means they remain in control of their data and get a trustworthy experience.

Live balance checks aren’t the only payment-experience-improving solutions that Finicity offers. To complement live balance checks, our Finicity Pay solution set also enables you to verify:

• Account and routing number
• Account owner and address

Live balance checks are the key to more successful, more confident money movement. To see Finicity’s instant balance insights in action, request a demo today.