Verifying to whom a specific bank account belongs often involves slow or unsecure methods such as requesting copies of bank statements or making micro-payments to accounts. Planky, through the use of open banking, delivers a modern account verification experience which is both fast and secure.
Planky Account Verification | Micro Deposits? | Bank Statements | |
---|---|---|---|
Description | Simple API query | Small amount sent to customer's account which customer is then required to verify | Customer emails or posts physical bank statement |
Time taken | < 1 minute | 3-5 business days | 5-7 business days |
Security | Very High | High | Low |
Customer Experience | Excellent | Average | Poor |
Customer Dropoff | Low | High | High |
By retrieving account information from a customer’s bank, Planky provides all the information necessary to quickly identify the owner of a particular bank account. Since the customer has to go through their own bank’s secure authorisation procedure in order to share their data, users can be sure the information is accurate, up-to-date and automatically verified.
Account verification is performed through Planky’s API (for a non-technical starter guide, see Make your first API call). To retrieve information to verify an account, first obtain the id of the customer you wish to verify from the Customer endpoint. This will be used to query the Accounts endpoint:
GET
/public/v3/customers/{customer_id}/accounts
The account id is a field generated by Planky as a unique identifier for that account and has no relation to the user’s bank. The Accounts endpoint contains information needed to successfully identify an account, such as the bank account number, bank name, etc.
Property | Accounts field |
---|---|
Account Id | id |
Account Name | name |
Bank Name | bank_slug |
Account Type | type |
Account number/sort code/IBAN | number |
Once you have the id of the account you wish to verify, use it to query the Account Party endpoint:
GET
/public/v3/customers/{customer_id}/accounts/{account_id}/party
This request will bring up personal information related to the account owner such as the account holder’s legal name, address and email/phone details. This is usually sufficient to verify the identity of the account holder.
Account party information is dependent on this data being made available by the customer's bank
Property | Accounts Party field |
---|---|
Name of Account Holder | Name, FullLegalName |
Address of account holder | AddressLine, StreetName, BuildingNumber, PostCode, TownName , CountrySubDivision, Country |
Telephone number of account holder | Phone, Mobile |
Email address of account holder | EmailAddress |
Planky enables your customers to share account information within your app enabling you to perform identity verification checks in seconds. This improves efficiency and customer experience by removing the need for cumbersome procedures such as bank statements or micro deposits.
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