From Monday 26th April 2021, we’re adding a new field to the Get Account API to fulfil an onboarding requirement for certain clients and their customers. Use this FAQ to find out what this means for you and how to make use of the new field.
Does this apply to me?
If you or your customers are contracting with our EU entity (Currencycloud BV) via our Outsourced KYC Global Business Introducer model, then this new field is relevant for you.
What's changing?
We’re adding a new field ‘bank_account_verified’ to the Get Account API to fulfill a penny testing onboarding requirement. You can read more about penny testing below. By adding this new field to our API, we’re giving you the ability to to see quickly and easily when a customer has passed the test. An account will typically be activated within 1-2 hours of a successful penny test completion.
With this additional field, you’ll be able to reflect the status of your customer’s penny test within your own interface. To make this even simpler, we’ve also built new notifications to let you or your customer know as soon as your customer has passed the test, removing the need to go and check.
What's penny testing and how does it work?
A penny test is used to verify the authenticity of a user’s bank account and confirm that the bank account belongs to the user. To complete this test, a user deposits a small amount (usually a penny and hence the name!) which returns the validated bank details along with the beneficiary name.
As this is now an onboarding requirement mandated by the Dutch Regulator, any customers based in the EU will now need to pass this test before we can fully activate their account.
To pass the penny test and complete the onboarding, your customers must deposit at least €00.01 into their Currencycloud account from a bank account in the name of the account holder which is located in the European Economic Area (EEA).
What do I need to do?
To get automatic notifications of when your customers pass their penny test, you’ll need to activate our new webhook and email notifications. Please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager to discuss the options available.
Alternatively, you can request the status of the penny test through the API. Once the new field is live you can add this field into your user interface to show you when your customer has passed the penny test. To do this you’ll need to start parsing this field from the Get Account API response. An example of the API response is below, with the new field, ‘bank_account_verified’, highlighted.
{
"id": "cf28b2d8-5afa-4d7f-9a26-7b45bf616a11",
"account_name": "My Example Account",
"brand": "currencycloud",
"your_reference": null,
"status": "enabled",
"street": "My Example Street",
"city": "My Example City",
"state_or_province": null,
"country": "GB",
"postal_code": "Example Code",
"spread_table": "fxcg_rfx_default",
"legal_entity_type": "company",
"created_at": "2018-04-26T15:05:01.000Z",
"updated_at": "2020-09-07T11:56:59.000Z",
"identification_type": null,
"identification_value": null,
"short_reference": "180426-00018",
"api_trading": true,
"online_trading": true,
"phone_trading": true,
"process_third_party_funds": false,
"settlement_type": "net",
"agent_or_reliance": false,
"terms_and_conditions_accepted": null
"bank_account_verified": true
}
When will the changes be live?
The new field will be added to the API and ready to use from Monday 26th April 2021. Webhook and email notifications will also be available from this date.