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Early Payment Access

Early Payment Access allows you to provide your customers with immediate access to funds that they are expecting to receive, based on a known future credit into the customer's account. Clients that are interested in offering Early Payment Access would have to provide the funds by pre-funding a dedicated organization account, and would assume any risks involved in granting early access.

Received ACH credits​

Received ACH credits may have a completion date set in the future. This means the receiving financial institution (Unit in this case) knows with that the funds will be available on a certain future date, before they actually hit the customer's account.

This characteristic of ACH payments is widely used in wage payouts. Employees often receive their wages in a post-dated ACH, typically the settlement date is T+2(two business days in the future). A common use case is providing the ability to "get paid early."

You may want to allow customers to access these funds immediately. To do that, you would need to fund a reserve account that serves as collateral, and make an API call that funds the customer's account. The funds will be automatically returned when the original ACH is completed.

Since there is no credit risk, and customers get lots of value, this is a very common experience for banking solutions to create.

Implementation​

note

In order to provide early access, you would need to create and fund a dedicated "early access reserve account". Please contact Unit to set it up.

  1. When Unit receives a future dated ACH, a ReceivedPayment resource will be created and the ReceivedPayment.created event will be fired. The ReceivedPayment will be in pending status.
  2. In order to provide access to the funds, you would call the advance API endpoint.
  3. The receivedPayment.advanced event will be fired.
  4. The funds will show up on the customer's account immediately, and the customer will see a single received ACH transaction on their account.
  5. Once the received payment completion date arrived, the funds will be automatically returned to the funding account.