Fund customer accounts, quickly and programmatically

Reliable and riskless bank transfers via API

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The landscape of financial technology is changing faster than ever. New banking products are launching every week. Non-financial companies are now embedding financial services into their existing products. The result?

Whether you are developing a new banking product or enhancing an existing one, quickly funding to your customers’ accounts is essential for success. A simpler user experience for your customers enhances your product, moving it closer to the center of their financial life. And new, powerful functionality within your product then drives revenue opportunities via increased deposits or spend.

So how do you add these capabilities without turning the revenue opportunity into a liability? Adding ACH is an obvious solution, but the default standard settlement times are slow. What about the associated processes for confirming account ownership, modeling risk, or managing failed transfers? What happens when you advance a user funds, process the transfer as fast as possible, but then receive a return code?

At Astra, we understand the challenges of money movement – orchestrating bank to bank transfers, defining the parameters for settlement, and balancing the nuances of risk. We built a scalable platform so that you can enable your customers to fund their accounts seamlessly and move money programmatically, within your existing application and all through a simple API integration.

Interbank Transfers

You need to get cash into your customer accounts as fast as possible with minimal friction. Astra facilitates transfers between bank accounts from a simple API call. Your customers authenticate once into their external bank account, your product sends a request defining source and destination account IDs, then Astra orchestrates the transfer. No need to build on ACH rails with elaborate onboarding flows – integrate with Astra and start moving funds.

Financial Automation

Beyond transfers for one-time funding, automation adds efficient funding to that account over time. If you want to empower your customers with sophisticated financial routines like sweep transfers or percentages of deposits, you might build all the authorization flows and transfer functionality yourself. Using Astra’s automation engine means you can offer these functions with a single integration. Our platform tracks the triggers, manages the automation, and executes the transfers, updating your system at each step of the process.

Virtual Sub Accounts

Adding more functionality to your product’s accounts gives your customer more ways to use that account for deposits or spend. With Astra, from a single real-world account, your customer can segment their balance for particular purposes or trackable goals, and define that specific partition as the source or destination of a transfer. Our platform manages these virtual instances and associated ledger, while facilitating funds between accounts intra-bank or inter-bank.

Default Fast Settlement

Time to money is a key expectation for today’s customer. To offset the risk of transfer failures and return codes, many products utilize standard processing speeds or universal and artificial transfer amounts. Astra operates in the opposite manner – all transfers are fast by default, where usage or settlement limits are only applied with precision and only for edge cases. A standard integration with our platform means your users can transfer $25,000 in plus one business day. Your customer can start using your product sooner and you can increase the amounts of inbound funds.

Riskless Performance

Utilizing the ACH network comes with potential fraud and transfer failures – you might be on the hook for the amount of a transfer that wasn’t completed or is assigned a return code. Acting as the ACH originator, you also don’t have recourse for these returned transfers. Astra’s clearing performance is best in class, with a reliability rate of 99.999%. When failures do occur, our system has automatic transfer healing and rebalancing of accounts. Out of the box, Astra evaluates user profiles across multiple data points, manages authorizations, and verifies all accounts for ownership. With our platform, you can empower your users with fast and secure transfers without taking on additional risk.

An API Designed for Financial Technology

Astra is designed to allow any developer to quickly and efficiently add financial functionality to their application. With a suite of pre-built automations, transfers orchestration between banks, integrated anti-fraud, and account virtualization, your customers can complete time-saving financial transactions with a few clicks and for a low cost.

We built the ideal fintech API – one painless integration to add powerful money moving capabilities to your product. Don’t worry about connectivity, risk assessment, or ledgering – we handle it all. Just send a request to our API and get the functionality you need.