Accelerated ACH with Astra

One of the most common ways of transferring funds is via ACH (Automated Clearing House) transfers. They are ubiquitous, yet the transfer structure exposes you to broad opportunities for fraud, failures, and lost funds. In addition, getting funds into a newly opened customer account is critical for a positive user experience with your product, but standard ACH timelines are 4 to 5 business days before the funds are available for use.

Astra’s Accelerated ACH solution

At Astra, we have rebuilt the ACH process with improved fraud detection and prevention, automated balance checking, and healing for returned or failed transfers. Your business is protected from fraud and return codes, while your customers can reliably send large sums of money between their accounts – default fast (sometimes in just 1 business day and up to $100k per transaction).

How It Works
While onboarding through your application, end-users’ identities will be instantly verified behind the scenes through our high-resolution security check to ensure no fraudsters get on our platform or yours. Once approved, end-users will be guided through our simple onboarding flow in which they’ll be prompted for a one-time authorization, which grants your application permission to move funds on their behalf via Astra. After authorizing, end-users will connect one or more of the several thousand financial institutions supported by MX or Plaid. With their bank accounts connected, end-users are ready to initiate a transfer between a source account (e.g their bank account connected via MX or Plaid) and a destination account (e.g. the account they have via your application). These transfers can be one-time or recurring and can be Me-to-Me, Peer-to-Peer, Business-to-Consumer, or Business-to-Business.

Before any money leaves their account, the settlement speed of the transfer itself is determined by and managed through the payment lifecycle by our best in class risk model. Our model not only verifies the end-user’s identity, but also verifies ownership of the connected accounts, assesses the institutional risk posed by these accounts, analyzes available balances, and cross references all this data to all prior activity conducted by the end-user to determine their overall risk. All this information is ultimately used to decide whether money can be transferred and if so, the settlement speed that is least likely to result in a failed transfer or a return code.

Note: to utilize Astra’s Accelerated ACH solution, we require that you have a direct integration with MX or Plaid for linking financial institutions.

Ease of integration
New to the Astra Platform? No problem! We have extensive documentation and sandbox environments which means that you can try all of the functionality of Astra without even signing a contract – often in as little as a few weeks. When you decide to go live, you will have a dedicated comms channel in Slack and an integrations partner to help make sure your application is ready for prime time.

Already an Astra customer? You are just a few steps away from being able to leverage our Accelerated ACH solution for your customer accounts. Through a direct integration with Plaid, your user base can link thousands of financial institutions as the funding source for T+1 ACH transfers to quickly fund their new accounts. Our Accelerated ACH solution leverages the same SDK and API as your Instant Funding solution, with the addition of a couple of new endpoints.

For more information, check out our Accelerated ACH solution. Want to create a best-in-class onboarding experience for your users? Get in touch!