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. You can implement this feature regardless of whether Visa or Mastercard is your primary network, or whether your account holders have Visa- or Mastercard-branded cards associated with their account.

By confirming your account holder's available funds at the moment of a transfer, you can reduce 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.

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 funds 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 has linked one of his external bank accounts to his account with you at PartnerBank. Reed then selects the option to add funds to his account, so your PartnerBank app calls the Balance Check feature, which confirms that Reed has sufficient funds. Seeing his account balance, he can confidently initiate the ACH transfer to his new PartnerBank account.

Implementation

To enable Balance Check via Mastercard Data Connect, you are responsible for integrating with Mastercard through its Connect SDK. Galileo performs the required back-end setup to configure your program.

For detailed, step-by-step instructions on implementing this product, see the Setting Up Balance Check via Mastercard Data Connect guide.