Getting Started
This guide will show the basics of verifying accounts using Yodlee. Account verification can help enable payments, avoid overdrafts, reduce fraud, and more. Verifying an account simply means your user has authenticated against the account, and then you get detailed information for the problem you're trying to solve. For instance, for payments, you might want to prove a user has access to an account, get the account routing number, and check the amount of money in it.
In this guide, we'll walk through all the steps needed to achieve complete flows for verifying account ownership and checking balance information. We'll also provide some other steps you can try out to dig deeper into the Yodlee API.
Sandbox Environment
The Sandbox environment is available free once you register for a developer account.
Sandbox comes enabled with 5 pre-configured users. It does not allow you to register new users. It is also restricted to using sample data for security reasons. Once you're comfortable and want to work with live transaction data, we recommend moving to the free Engage Tier. This guide assumes you are using the Sandbox environment.
FastLink
Account Verification starts with your user authenticating and selecting an account at any of the thousands of banks we support. To accomplish this, our FastLink technology saves you from dealing with complex technical interactions and managing their disparate user experiences to connect to and authenticate with those banks. FastLink also helps unify financial institutions that support Open Banking and those without a single managed experience, ensuring that your application always utilizes the most modern experience available.
The FastLink documentation provides many more details about the FastLink technology and how you can use it to meet your requirements. The FastLink Demo will show you the user experience of linking accounts, while the Configuration Tool Demo will show you how you can customize FastLink to meet your requirements and match the look and feel of your application.
FastLink Documentation FastLink Demo FastLink Configuration Tool Demo
Introduction Videos
Start by viewing these videos to help prepare you to start building your FinTech application.
Guide to the Yodlee Ecosystem
Guide to Yodlee Verification
Key Terms
- Users - End users of your application. In other words, your customers.
- Providers - Data providers. The financial institutions, like banks, credit card companies, and so on.
- Provider accounts - This refers to the accounts your users use to access their provider information. For example, if a bank has a web portal, your user has to log in to an account to use it.
- FastLink - You need to connect or "link" your users to the accounts they hold. FastLink is an embeddable Yodlee tool designed to make this easy.
- Accounts - This refers to your users' accounts held by a provider, like a checking or savings account.
Typically, you'll be working with three different account types:
- Provider accounts - These are the accounts your user and, through Yodlee, you use to access banking, investment, and other financial services provider information.
- Financial accounts - These are the traditional accounts like checking, savings, credit card, loan accounts, and so on.
- Application accounts - These are the accounts you create to track and provide services to your customers.
Prerequisites
To complete this guide, you'll need to:
- Register for a developer account.
- Get your credentials from your API dashboard.
- Pick one of the 5 pre-registered test users to work with.
Start Coding Using Postman
Once you understand the basics from above and have completed the prerequisites, follow along in our Postman Quick Start Guide, which provides several step-by-step modules to quickly introduce developers to the necessary parameters, API calls, sample code, FastLink integration, data structures, and account simulator techniques which are foundational to begin building your application.