The Cross River operating system (COS) gives you many different account solutions through a suite of product types. You can open accounts for your customers in COS under any product type we define and configure together with you.

COS supports both transactional and non-transactional account solutions.

We support several transactional and non-transactional account product types so you can offer your customers different kinds of accounts based on your agreement with CR. Some of our products types include:

The product type determines the behaviors and configurations of these accounts. CR provides you with a Product ID for each account type that you want to offer your customers. You need this Product ID to create accounts. Speak to your Implementation or Relationship Manager for more details, including how to set up product types for your customers.

A demand deposit account means that an account owner can withdraw their funds whenever they want with no restrictions or penalties.

You can open and manage demand deposit accounts for your customers, such as checking and savings, using our DDA APIs. DDA accounts are also referred to as Master accounts.

Certificates of Deposit (CDs), or time deposits, are a special type of savings account. Once the predefined amount of money is deposited in a time deposit account within the predefined time frame, customers cannot add any more money and the account is locked. If the customer decides to withdraw the funds before the configured maturity date, they will pay a penalty fee of a set number of days of interest.

All time deposit products have a defined number of months that the account remains locked and an interest rate for accrual during this time period.

A penalty month is the maximum number of months that a penalty applies. Configuring penalty months as 12 would mean that if the money is withdrawn (account is closed) before 12 months have passed, (x) fee days would be withdrawn from the account as a penalty.

Fee days defines how many days of simple interest to assess as a penalty. Time deposits have a maximum of 2 penalty tiers.

Create a CD account with the Open a deposit account endpoint. You must have the proper product ID, and a customer ID for the account holder.

General Ledger (GL) accounts are internal accounts used for accounting purposes for internal reconciliation. COS processes each transaction through a GL account. A GL account must reconcile to zero (0) at the end of the day.

Although GL accounts are meant for CR-partner reconciliation, there are times when you might want to open a GL account for external purposes. For example, if you handle payroll deposits for a customer, you may need to overdraw on an account to be able to send salaries to the customers before the employer’s funds have been deposited into your account. A regular account can’t be overdrawn, but this GL can serve as the account that can be overdrawn.

A transaction in COS always involves a debit of one account and a credit of another account, completed as a single atomic (simple) operation. Both sides of the transaction must happen for it to be considered completed. If, for example, the debit account does not have enough money to cover the transaction, the credit operation will not complete.

This makes sure that accounts are never out of balance and makes tracking where the money is much easier.

An account activity record is created for tracking money movement for each account within a transaction.

A newly created activity record has a Pending status until the posting day closes during nightly settlement process. At this point, COS reorders the account activity records for statement purposes as described in your deposit account agreement. COS assigns a posting sequence number to each account activity record and changes the status to Posted. Once this is done, the activity is considered final and is not updated anymore.

Think of a memo post as a temporary transaction. It tells the system something about the account—usually that some money will be coming in or going out.

A memo post is applied only to one side of a transaction, and may or may not affect the account available balance. A memo post might stay on an account for many days. When it expires it falls off and, if necessary, the information in it becomes a permanent transaction.

For example, when you pay for gas with a debit card, COS puts a memo post on your account until the transaction completes. When the charge is captured and finalized, the memo post falls off and is converted to a transaction showing the actual amount spent at the gas station.

An example of an "informational" memo post is with an inbound ACH credit. When CR receives an instruction from the Federal Reserve about an inbound ACH credit, we put a memo post on the account right away even though the effective date of the actual transfer might not be until the following day. The job of this memo post is to tell the account holder that there is going to be some change to their account in the future.

A posting exception is like an account activity record, except it only happens when one side of a transaction fails authorization. For example, if the debit side of a transaction fails due to insufficient funds in the account, COS creates a posting exception record on that account. COS does not put a posting exception on the credit side of the transaction because it did not fail in this example.

Certain credit transactions post with an availability schedule. These schedules give instructions about the amount of the full transaction that will be available on each day after posting.

These days until all the funds are available are also called the clearing window.The schedule appears on both the transaction and account activity records. It appears as a array (list) of dollar amounts, where each element of the array represents a posting day.

For example, the following illustrates how an ACH pull transaction may look with a 2-day clearing schedule (lines 15-18):

The ACH payment is for $27.00 total. The schedule attribute shows that $0 will be available immediately on day 1 and that also nothing will be available on day 2. On day 3 the full $27.00 is available. Items such as checks generally make partial funds available each day while the item clears.

In addition to the schedule attribute, for convenience the response includes an isClearing flag to show whether the item is still within the clearing window. In the above example, the flag switches to false on 8/1.

The schedule is enforced via one or more account holds relating to the item in clearing, correlated by the railId field. For example, the schedule above would be held as follows:

Note that the hold expires at the close of business on 7/31, thus making the $27.00 available starting on the 8/1 posting day.

Interest accrual is not affected by availability schedules. Accrual will continue to start on the date of the credit regardless of any holds which are in place.

For each Deposit Account CR provides a monthly account statement. The statement contains all posted activity inclusive of the period start and end dates. The statement lists details according to the posting sequence of the account activity records. The document is retrievable as a PDF file.

CR enables you to get PDFs of tax documents such as IRS Form 1099. When your customer wants to see a tax document, use our APIs to retrieve and display the PDF in your app. Use Explorer if you want to retrieve a single document directly.

Your RM lets you know when a specific type of tax document is available for download.

Tax document retrieval uses these endpoints:

What is Early Direct Deposit?

Traditional direct deposit means that, for example, when an employer deposits a paycheck, the deposit is posted to the customer account on the effective date. Early Direct Deposit gives customers who receive their paycheck through direct deposit access to their funds up to 2 days earlier than traditional direct deposit. Cross River settles funds upon receipt of the ACH file from the Federal Reserve rather than waiting to release them on the effective date.

By providing Early Direct Deposit, you benefit your customers by improving their cash flows, which could enable them to avoid overdrafts, pay down debt, and generally experience less financial stress.

By meeting customer preferences for quicker access to funds, you may encourage more engagement with your services. Earlier settlement of funds may also support greater debit card usage, potentially generating increased interchange revenue.

Learn more about Early Direct Deposit.