About Statements

In the United States, financial institutions are required to provide "periodic" (usually monthly) statements for bank accounts, if accessible by ATM, debit card, or other electronic transactions. If you are building your own UI (as opposed to using the Instant Banking app) your app acts as the bank's frontend and must provide your cardholders access to monthly statements.

A bank statement is useful to your cardholders for two main purposes:

1. Reconciliation - your cardholders can gain an overview of their account activity and check for errors and potentially fraudulent transactions.
2. Future reference - your cardholders may need to refer to previous bank statements to file a tax return or apply for a loan.

What's on a Statement

• Your branding
• Account information
• Bank information
• Summary of account activity
  • Starting balance
  • Chronological list of deposits, withdrawals, and fees
  • Ending balance

What you should do with the Statements

If your customers are using the Instant Banking app, they will be served the statements and you don't need to worry about it. You can still store them for your own records if you wish.

If you are building the banking app, you need to allow your customers to access each applicable statement from the time they open the account. The list of applicable statements is available from GET /cardholders/:id/accounts/:id/statements. A PDF of an individual statement is available from GET /cardholders/:id/accounts/:id/statements/:id.

How to obtain a Statement

Step 1: Obtain a List of Available Statements

Use the API to get a list of available statements for an Account. The response contains a list of all applicable statements since the account was created. Each statement record contains a statement_id and statement_date, but not the statement itself — that will be obtained in Step 2. One thing to note is that the statement_date is formatted YYYY-MM.

Your UI should display a list of each of these statements and allow your Cardholder to select which statement they want to view.

Step 2: Obtain the Encoded Statement PDF

After your Cardholder has selected a statement from the list, use the API to get an encoded PDF of the desired statement. The statement is passed as a Base64 encoded string of the statement PDF.

Step 3: Decode and Display the Statement PDF

Use a Base64 decoder to decode the encoded PDF. Display the PDF in a WebView or some other PDF viewer.