Deposits, withdrawals and transfers can be understood as being part of a transaction. In the Cross River operating system (COS) a transaction always involves a debit of one account (withdrawal) and a credit of another account (deposit), 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.

Once you've opened an account, use our payment APIs to send and receive funds between banks via ACH, Instant Payments, Wires, International payments or Checks. You can also use Instant Payments to tranfer funds within Cross River, with our CRNow option.

When a deposit, withdrawal, or transfer is made, we update the account to show this activity. We call this an activity record. This ensures that the account balance is accurate and reflects all the money going in and out of the account. It's similar to updating a digital ledger to keep track of all your financial transactions.

A newly created activity record has a Pending status until the posting day closes during the 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 further.

For each deposit account Cross River 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.

In banking, a "post" refers to the process of recording a transaction in your account. There are several types of posts.

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 is removed and, as applicable, the information in it becomes a posted transaction activity record.

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

An example of an "informational" memo post is with an inbound ACH credit. When Cross River 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.

You can register for account management webhook events, including memo post webhook events. A webhook event tells you the activity status.

Availability schedules

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.

Restrictions

Restrictions provide a mechanism to block certain transaction activity on an account

For example, if you wanted to block all ACH activity on an account, you could add a restriction which only applies to the ACH rail. If you then wanted to entirely freeze an account, where all activity was blocked, you could add a restriction which applies to all rails.

Partner vs. internal restrictions

As the name suggests, a Partner restriction is one that is applied by a Partner user. It is visible to all users and can be modified by both Partner and Internal users. By contrast an Internal restriction is one that is visible to Partner users, but cannot be modified or removed by them. For example, an internal Operations Team member may apply an Internal account freeze if they do not want it to be modified by the Partner.

This division between Partner restrictions and Internal restrictions also applies to holds.

Restriction policies

Restriction policies are managed at the product level and define the types of transactions allowed for the program as a whole. Account level restrictions can be applied in addition to these. These policies are not managed by the partner and are configured by the Integration Team for your product.

Creating restrictions

Account restrictions work by defining a set of criteria in which the restriction applies to. For example, if we wanted to block all ACH debits over $100 to an account we would create a restriction like this:

Null values indicate a wildcard that any value would match.

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.

Sometimes even after you open a bank account, you need to add or update details of the account holder customer record. You can update the account holder address, phone number and email. You can also add details to the customer record about an ID document for that account holder.

For every record, you can have multiple addresses and so forth, but you designate one of each as the primary detail. For example you have a primary address and phone number.

Among other purposes, these details are important for identity verification to fight fraud and money laundering.

See our customer record management APIs and tutorials to learn how to update or add this information.