Connect External Accounts

External bank accounts may be connected to an Account Holder as a funding source. These accounts may be used to transfer funds to or from a Financial Account via ACH.

Highnote has partnered with Plaid and Finicity as secure options for your Account Holders to verify and link their external accounts. The Account Holders can connect their account by invoking Plaid or Finicity’s widget from your app or website. Once linked, Account Holders can seamlessly transfer funds (via ACH) between the Highnote Financial Account and the external bank account.

Fund In: To transfer funds in to a Highnote Financial Account (Destination Account), the bank account details of the external account (Source Account) must be verified per the NACHA guidelines. Today, Highnote supports Bank account verification via Plaid or Finicity.

Fund Out: For transferring funds from a Highnote Financial Account to an external bank account, the bank account does not need to be verified, but an external verified account may be used. Fund-out transfers can only be initiated on Products with a cash deposit (e.g. Debit Card, Secured Credit Card).

The type name of NonVerifiedExternalUSFinancialBankAccount on the external financial account will indicate that the account can only be used to fund out a payment. ExternalFinancialBankAccount type name will indicate that the account may be used to fund in or fund out a payment.

Plaid and Highnote have partnered to provide a simple way for your Account Holders to fund or make payments to their accounts on your platform. Your Account Holders can connect their external bank accounts from Plaid's drop-in module within your app or website. Once an external bank account is verified, you can use Highnote to transfer money between the Account Holder’s external bank account and their Financial Account.

This integration was built with security in mind, as it eliminates the need for you to store sensitive information from your Account Holder’s external bank accounts.

Set Up Your Plaid Account

To get started sign up for Plaid API keys.

You'll need to create an account at Plaid and integrate with Plaid Link to create a link_token by following the instructions in Plaid's Documentation. Once your customer has selected and verified the external bank account they’ll use, Plaid will provide you with Highnote’s processor_token. You'll send this token to Highnote, and we will use it to securely retrieve account and routing numbers from Plaid.

Note: The accounts array from Plaid will contain information about bank accounts associated with the credentials entered by the user, and may contain multiple accounts if the user has more than one bank account at the institution. Highnote requires a single bank account be provided. To have the customer select a single account to link, set Account Select to "enabled for one account" in the Plaid Developer Dashboard. When this setting is selected, the accounts array will always contain exactly one account.

Test Plaid Connections

You can create Highnote processor_tokens in all three of Plaid’s API environments:

• Plaid Sandbox: test simulated users
• Plaid Development: test live users
• Plaid Production: production environment for when you're ready to go live and have valid Highnote Live Environment API Keys

Link Account Holder’s External Bank Account

Once you have received the processor_token from Plaid, you’ll provide this token to Highnote. Highnote will then retrieve the account number, routing number, and account type from Plaid and link the information to the associated Account Holder for future payment usage.

If the response includes a Processor Token related error, you should obtain a new processor_token from Plaid and reattempt adding the external bank account. You should use the error response to resolve the issue with Plaid. Your customer may need to resubmit their bank account credentials in order for you to retrieve a new processor_token.

Please see Plaid's documentation on errors for a comprehensive list of possible Plaid related errors.

Finicity and Highnote have partnered to provide a simple way for your Account Holders to fund or make payments to their accounts on your platform. Your Account Holders can connect their external bank accounts from Finicity within your app or website. Once an external bank account is verified, you can use Highnote to transfer money between the Account Holder’s external bank account and their Financial Account.

This integration was built with security in mind, as it eliminates the need for you to store sensitive information from your Account Holder’s external bank accounts.

Set Up Your Finicity Account

To get started, sign up for Finicity API keys.

Once you have Finicity API Keys, you create a Finicity Access Token to onboard your Account Holders and have them select and verify their external bank account to be used. Once the Access Token is shared with Highnote, we will use this Access Token to securely retrieve account and routing numbers from Finicity.

Test Finicity Connections

You can test the Finicity API keys in a live environment, using their preset test profiles to test for all scenarios. Finicity has also set up mock FinBanks to simulate testing against live Financial Institutions.

In order to proceed with testing, you would need to first set up your environment and follow the instructions.

1. Generate Finicity-App-Token
2. Create a test customer in Finicity's System
3. Generate Connect URL and simulate customer linking bank accounts to Finicity
4. Refresh customer accounts
5. Generate 3rd party api access token information to send to Highnote: POST request to https://api.finicity.com/aggregation/v1/partners/accessKey

Headers:

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Accept: application/json,
Content-Type: application/json,
Finicity-App-Token: <app-token-from-step-0>,
Finicity-App-Key: <app-key-from-developer-portal>

Body (raw, JSON):

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{
  "customerId": "<customer-id-from-step-1>",
  "partnerId": "<subscriber-partner-id-from-developer-portal>",
  "thirdPartyPartnerId": "<Highnote-partner-id>",
  "products": [
    {
      "product": "moneyTransferDetails",
      "payorId": "<subscriber-partner-id-from-developer-portal>",
      "maxCalls": 1000,
      "accountId": "<account-id-from-step-3>",
      "accessPeriod": {
        "type": "timeframe",
        "startTime": "2022-03-10T06:06:20Z",
        "endTime": "2023-03-10T06:06:20Z"
      }
    },
    {
      "product": "availableBalanceLive",
      "payorId": "<subscriber-partner-id-from-developer-portal>",
      "maxCalls": 1000,
      "accountId": "<account-id-from-step-3>",
      "accessPeriod": {
        "type": "timeframe",
        "startTime": "2022-03-10T06:06:20Z",
        "endTime": "2023-03-10T06:06:20Z"
      }
    },
    {
      "product": "accountOwner",
      "payorId": "<subscriber-partner-id-from-developer-portal>",
      "maxCalls": 1000,
      "accountId": "<account-id-from-step-3>",
      "accessPeriod": {
        "type": "timeframe",
        "startTime": "2022-03-10T06:06:20Z",
        "endTime": "2023-03-10T06:06:20Z"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Sample Response Payload:

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{
  "data": [
    {
      "receipt": {
        "profile": 3,
        "version": "1",
        "receiptId": "cr_vYdb1DGoLpI9opOqwkkfBy464SmIDd",
        "receiptVersion": "1",
        "customerId": "5543088633794259024",
        "partnerId": 2445583993914,
        "products": [
          {
            "product": "moneyTransferDetails",
            "accountId": "8977412844634022494",
            "accessPeriod": {
              "type": "timeframe",
              "startTime": "2022-03-10T06:06:20Z",
              "endTime": "2023-03-10T06:06:20Z"
            }
          },
          {
            "product": "availableBalanceLive",
            "accountId": "1045023535892401594",
            "accessPeriod": {
              "type": "timeframe",
              "startTime": "2022-03-10T06:06:20Z",
              "endTime": "2023-03-10T06:06:20Z"
            }
          },
          {
            "product": "accountOwner",
            "accountId": "5200183909259568542",
            "accessPeriod": {
              "type": "timeframe",
              "startTime": "2022-03-10T06:06:20Z",
              "endTime": "2023-03-10T06:06:20Z"
            }
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Link Account Holder’s External Bank Account

Now that you have a Finicity Access Token, you can call the Highnote GraphQL API with the following mappings to link your Account Holders External Bank Account:

• moneyTransferDetails -> ACH_DETAILS
• availableBalanceLive -> CURRENT_BALANCE
• accountOwner -> ACH_OWNER_DETAILS

The Test Environment does not call Plaid or Finicity when connecting an external bank account.

When testing, you can simulate connecting an external bank account via Plaid or Finicity by calling the AddExternalBankAccountVerifiedThroughPlaid or AddExternalBankAccountVerifiedThroughFinicity mutations and providing Plaid processor_token or Finicity receiptId values which trigger the success or failure responses you may receive in production.

Only Verified External Bank Accounts linked via Plaid may be disconnected at this time.

If your customer wishes to disconnect an external bank account, your customer or support agents (via the Dashboard) can remove the Account Holder’s external bank account.

All scheduled payments associated with the external bank account will be cancelled when the external bank account is deleted. If the Financial Account has a pending payment from the external bank account, the account cannot be removed until the pending payment(s) settles.

Once removed, the customer will need to re-verify their identity to add the bank account to their Account again.

External Bank Accounts that have not been verified by a third-party service such as Plaid or Finicity are considered to be "Non-Verified". Funds may only be sent to a Non-Verified External Bank Account from a Highnote Financial Account, Non-Verified Accounts may not be used to move funds into Highnote.

The most common use case for Non-Verified Bank Accounts is to return funds to an Account Holder in the event of account closure.

When connecting an external bank account, your Account Holder will need to provide the external account’s routing number, account number, and account type (e.g. checking or savings). A nickname can be assigned to the external account for reference to future payments. The added bank account will be connected to the Account Holder, and can be found by searching for the Account Holder’s linked bank accounts.

Note: A bank account number can be de-tokenized if it has been added through addNonVerifiedExternalFinancialBankAccount. For bank accounts connected and verified via the addExternalBankAccountFromToken, the bank account number cannot be de-tokenized for security purposes.

Non-verified External Accounts may not be disconnected from an Account Holder at this time.

You can view and present a list of an Account Holder's external bank accounts in your experience.