At Dwolla, our goal is to make ACH transactions easier for our partners to manage. Managing ACH returns has long been a point of frustration for anyone using the ACH network, let alone for partners using our Access API.
We’re excited to share that we’re leading the way with new functionality making it easier than ever to manage ACH returns. In short, here is what’s new:
- Within the Dashboard, you can deactivate and reactivate Customers
- See the Customer verification status separate from the bank account verification status
- Easily manage the effects of failed ACH transactions and reactivate customers right within a user-friendly interface of the Dashboard
Understanding the situation
In the world of ACH payments, failed transactions are a fact of life. Reasons a transaction might fail can range from the typical (Insufficient Funds) to the obscure (Return of XCK entry). Whatever the specific reason, they do happen.
Currently, in the fintech industry, there are very few truly effective ways to manage these failures — in fact, we’ve heard from our partners that there aren’t really any good solutions. ACH returns are treated as an external, one-off problem, left to the companies using the network to deal with. They have to figure out why it happened, what exactly happened, and even how to fix it.
At Dwolla, we’ve changed that process.
We’ve been doing some research at Dwolla. Our Product and Engineering teams have gone through an extensive process to understand the reasons for ACH failures and determining what actions should be taken based on those reasons for failure. Finally, the last step in the research was understanding the best way to provide Access API Partners with the ability to rectify the situations caused by those failures.
Dwolla is making it easier to manage failed ACH transactions
We’ve made some enhancements to the Access API to improve return code management. These new enhancements allow us to fine-tune actions based on why failures are occurring, in turn, helping reduce risk for our customers, but also provide them the greatest level of business continuity.
Dwolla has enhanced the API to allow Partners to deactivate a customer, but they can also now reactivate customer accounts as well. These enhancements put some of the decision making and control in the hands of our Access API Partners.
We believe that you’re the expert on your Access API integration, and each time we make an improvement like this you get more control and impact on your customer’s journey.
The addition of reactivation gives our partners the ability to resolve many of the situations caused by failed ACH transactions. Now Partners can reactivate an account, get back the money they’re owed and reconcile that user’s account balance.
And the “cherry on top” is that all of this functionality is now available right within the Dashboard!
Easing the process for Partners
Providing this added functionality within the Dashboard means our Access API Partners don’t have to start from scratch in building processes and internal systems to manage returns or failures. Now, based on a customer’s status, Partners can easily activate and deactivate customers as needed.
Additionally, we have split out the customer’s verification status (active or deactivated) from the bank account status (verified, unverified, or removed). This provides a better understanding of a customer’s ability to accept or receive transactions.
We believe these changes will make a serious impact on our Partners’ ability to resolve failed transactions, and in-turn makes their day-to-day payments operation more fluid and effective.
Stay tuned, these changes are just the start to our ever-pursuant goal of making Dwolla’s Dashboard the standard in ACH transaction management.
Originally published at Dwolla by John Jackovin on October 24, 2017.
