Balance Check via Mastercard Data Connect

Use Balance Check via Mastercard Data Connect to perform real-time balance inquiries on linked external accounts before initiating an outgoing ACH debit. This optional feature helps you improve transfer success rates and provide a better experience for your account holders.

By confirming your account holder's available funds at the moment of a transfer, you can reduce non-sufficient funds (NSF) returns, avoid costly fees, and stay within Nacha's risk thresholds for returned transactions. Galileo enables this functionality through our Mastercard partner. This guide provides the implementation details for Balance Check.

Prerequisites

• To offer Balance Check to your account holders, you must first set up external account linking using Galileo's Account Linking via Mastercard Data Connect.
• You must integrate with Mastercard's Connect (Full or Lite) SDK. Refer to Mastercard's SDK documentation for details.
• Galileo must perform some setup steps on the back end to enable this feature to work with your system.
• If you are currently using Galileo for ACH, you will need to work with Galileo to have your system call the new account linking endpoints instead of ACH endpoints.

How it works

You can perform a balance check before initiating a transfer, at the moment of transfer, or both.

Before a transfer is initiated, use Get External Account Link to retrieve an account holder's linked account details. If you enable Balance Check on this call, your app can display the available balance to the user. This allows you to inform the user how much they can transfer or programmatically restrict them from attempting a transfer that exceeds their available funds.

At the moment of transfer, the Create ACH Transaction endpoint initiates an ACH debit. If you enable Balance Check on this call, Galileo performs a final fund check before processing the transaction. If the check returns an NSF response, the transaction is stopped, and you can immediately display an error message to the account holder.

Use case: New account funding

Reed decides to open a new debit account with PartnerBank and needs to fund it from his existing Finbank account. Reed navigates to the "Add Funds" section of the PartnerBank app and selects the option to link his bank. He chooses Finbank from the list and securely logs in with his bank credentials. After selecting his checking account, the link is established and verified in seconds. Reed then selects the option to add funds to his account, so PartnerBank's app calls the Balance Check feature, which confirms Reed has sufficient funds. Seeing his account balance, he can confidently initiate the ACH transfer to his new PartnerBank account.

Implementation

Enable this feature by passing an optional input parameter in two different Payment Hub API endpoints.

Input parameter

mastercardBalanceCheck — Set this parameter to Y to perform a real-time balance check on the specified external account. If this parameter is not provided or is set to N, no balance check is performed.

Endpoints

• Get External Account Link — Use this endpoint to retrieve external account details, including the available balance if you pass includeBalance: Y.
• Create ACH Transaction — Use this endpoint to create an ACH transaction. If finicityBalanceCheck: Y is passed, Galileo performs the balance check before processing the transfer.

Timeout consideration: When you set the mastercardBalanceCheck to Y, you must increase the timeout on your API request to at least 25 seconds. The balance check process can take up to 20 seconds, and failing to extend your timeout will result in connection errors.

Status codes

If a balance check performed during a Create ACH Transaction call fails due to insufficient funds, the endpoint returns the following status code:

• 429-04 — Insufficient funds for debit transactions

Workflow

These are the entities involved in Balance Check via Mastercard Data Connect:

• Account holder — Your customer, who has at least one account on your platform
• Your system — Your mobile app or web page
• Galileo — The Galileo system
• External bank — Houses the account holder's external bank account
• Link provider — Interfaces with the external bank. For Balance Check via Mastercard Data Connect, the link provider is Mastercard.

Use the following flowchart to understand how your system interacts with these entities during the balance check process.

1. The account holder logs in to your system.
2. You call the Get External Account Link endpoint.
3. Galileo connects to the account holder's external bank.
4. The link provider checks for the account balance.
5. If the account balance is available:
   1. The external bank returns the account's current balance.
   2. Galileo relays the account balance to you.
   3. You display the account balance to the account holder.
6. If the account balance is not available:
   1. Galileo returns a NOT AVAILABLE status.
   2. The account holder chooses whether to continue the transaction despite being unable to check their balance first. The rest of these steps assume the account holder chooses to continue with the transaction.
7. The account holder requests to pull funds from the external account.
8. You call the Create ACH Transaction endpoint.
9. Galileo creates an ACH transaction.
10. Galileo checks that the external bank account contains sufficient funds.
11. If the funds are available in the account, Galileo posts the transaction to the account after the hold period expires.
12. If the funds are not available in the account, Galileo stops the transaction due to nonsufficient funds (NSF).
13. Galileo sends an HTTP response reflecting whether the transaction succeeded.