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A Payroll Card Product is a prepaid card type that allows employees to receive their paychecks directly onto the card from their employer. These are typically a more convenient, less expensive, and safer digital alternative to paper checks. Once a payroll card is issued to an employee, they can use it to make purchases anywhere a debit card is accepted, withdraw cash, and even make automatic bill payments.
A Payroll Card product enables you to issue a prepaid payment card type that would be funded by the Employer directly on payday, giving employees fast and flexible access to their wages. Payroll cards are reloadable and funded via ACH/Direct Deposit from the employer. These payroll cards may be virtual cards available on your app or website, tokenized cards on digital wallets such as Apple Pay, or physical cards mailed to your card’s account holder. With Highnote, you can create a physical card order for one individual or a group of different individuals with our group shipping feature.
In the Test Environment, you can create a Payroll Card Product from the Highnote Dashboard or with the CreateCardProduct
mutation in the Highnote GraphQL API.
Account Holders (Person) must have US-based addresses and identification documents.
Payment Cards are issued to Account Holders. Once you have a Card Product, you will need to create Account Holders (individual users) to issue Payment Cards.
For issuing Payment Cards to a Business rather than a Person, see "Create an Account Holder - Business."
Once you have created an Account Holder, you can open an Application to onboard them to your Card Product.
Opening an Application triggers the identity verification checks (KYC) necessary for your Card Product. These checks must pass in order to onboard the Account Holder. To create the Application you will need the cardProductId
and primaryAuthorizedPersonId
.
When the Application is opened, it will be in a PENDING
state. This means the Application is being reviewed and the appropriate KYC checks are running against the Account Holder. You can only have one Application open at a time for a given Card Product and Account Holder.
Before an Application is submitted, the required terms and conditions and relevant disclosures for the Card Product (e.g. the Cardholder Agreement) must be presented and agreed to by the Account Holder. An Account Holder’s consent must be captured before opening an Application and include who is consenting, primaryAuthorizedPerson
, what they are consenting to, cardProductID
, and when they consented, consentTimestamp
.
Financial Accounts hold the balance for Payment Cards. To create a new Financial Account pass the ID of a verified Application.
Financial Accounts with the DIRECT_DEPOSIT
feature have an associated account and routing number to be used for funds movements originated outside of Highnote.
To display the account and routing number, you can fetch them from the API by generating a Client Token and using that token to view the restricted details.
With a Financial Account ID, you can simulate a Non-Originated ACH Transfer from an external bank account into a Highnote Financial Account.
Non-Originated Transfers do not require you to connect an external bank account.
Once you have created and funded a Financial Account, you can issue a Payment Card. All Payment Cards start as a virtual card, and can later be ordered as a physical card.
You may only submit one order for a given Payment Card. If the order is canceled or fails, you may try again for the same card. However, if an order is successful and you need another Physical Card, you will need to issue a new Payment Card.
Once you have issued a Payment Card you can create an order for a Physical Card. When ordering a Physical Card, you can ship to the Account Holder's address on file or specify a different shipping address.
Physical Card orders require:
Use the following mutation to create a Physical Card order:
Selecting the number
or cvv
fields requires that you are PCI compliant.
Highnote recommends using the Card Viewer SDK to securely display payment card data and and reduce PCI burden.
To display the primary account number (PAN) and CVV to users, you can fetch them from the API by adding number
and cvv
to the selection set
Once you've completed the basics of setting up your card product, you can expand and test your integration further: