When onboarding a new merchant, one of the most overlooked - but critical - steps is verifying the bank account behind the business. Whether you're processing payments, offering credit, or enabling payouts, you need to confirm you're sending money to the right place.

The traditional methods?
Either they ask merchants to log in to their bank account (high friction), or they passively check account details - with incomplete coverage and limited reliability.

We just launched Bank Verification, a passive, API-first verification feature that helps companies verify US-based bank accounts - without requiring logins through open banking providers or additional documents such as voided checks.

The problem

Most platforms have to verify a merchant’s bank account as part of onboarding. It’s used to confirm payout accounts, protect against fraud, and ensure compliance. But the current options create a tradeoff between friction and coverage:

• Open banking flows require the merchant to log in to their bank account, which introduces friction and drop-off in addition to lower coverage for business bank accounts.
  
• Incumbent set of passive verification tools (name + routing + account number) are lower friction, but often return “not found” for 20–30% of accounts.
  
• Many vendors still charge for every call, even when no data is returned. Some also require monthly minimums or long-term contracts.
  

When a passive check fails, teams typically fall back to manual methods - voided checks, microdeposits, screenshots.That tremendously slows down business onboarding, increases support costs, and hurts conversion.

What we’re launching

We built Bank Verification to help platforms passively verify a merchant’s bank account with minimal friction and broader coverage.

With a single API call, you can pass:

• Account number
  
• Routing number
  
• Name on the account

‍
We’ll return two things:

• Authentication → does the name match the account?
  
• Validation → is the account open and able to receive funds?
  

That’s it. No logins. No PDFs. No manual intervention.

Why it’s different

We designed this product around the gaps we’ve seen in the current tools:

• Wider coverage
  ~80%+ of US accounts can be verified through our system, reducing fallback to manual checks.
  
• No charges on “not found”
  If we can’t return a result, you don’t pay. Period.
  
• No monthly minimums or long-term contracts
  For the customers of our risk platform, it’s usage-based, with simple pricing and zero overhead for testing or lower volume use cases.
  

How teams are using it

We work with companies onboarding small businesses at scale - often in payments, credit, and embedded finance. In most cases such as for payment facilitators, payment ISOs and acquiring banks, verifying the bank account is a required step before funds can be paid out to a business.

Before this feature, teams were either using high-friction open banking flows or patching together vendors with limited coverage.

Now, they can:

• Verify account details passively during onboarding
  
• Eliminate the need for manual document collection
  
• Reduce fraud risk by catching name mismatches early
  
• Speed up time-to-payout

What’s next

This is just the first version. In future updates, we plan to include:

• A fraud risk score for each bank account
  
• A confidence score based on signal strength
  
• Additional metadata, like estimated account age
  

We’re building towards a more intelligent way to understand the risk behind a bank account—not just whether it exists.

Final thoughts

Bank account verification shouldn’t be what slows you down.
With broader coverage, no-login flows, and zero-cost “not found” calls, we’re making this part of onboarding easier for platforms—and safer for everyone.

Get in touch to enable Bank Verification for your account