We are sending client payments to a segregated account for a broker/dealer. They are requesting that we attach information to the ACH so that they can match the payment to a customer account number. Is there a way to do this through the Dwolla API? Is that what the metadata field is for?
For example, it would be helpful if we could fill in the Statement Description that the client sees in their transaction blotter.
Ping, can someone answer this?
Hi @lucio , You could explore using Addenda records as a way to pass along supplemental information with the ACH entry. One caveat, NACHA doesn’t enforce that the bank displays information in this field on a customer’s bank statement. Here are the docs which outline the field in the API where you can pass this information.
I tried specifying addenda records in a transfer and got:
“code”: “NotAllowed”,
“message”: “Supplying ach addenda entries is currently not enabled.”,
Can you turn this on for our account? This would be for Sandbox and for Prod.
@lucio this feature has been enabled on your Sandbox account. A member from the Dwolla team should have reached out with more information. Please let me know if that’s not the case and I can follow up internally!
The feature has been enabled. I sent an ACH on Friday with some custom metadata (transfer id 1fd1741b-61b6-ee11-ac7e-0a27ad48efdb). One the sending side, my statement says:
“ACH CleverAlpha (Pending)”
This is a multi-leg payment. The other transfer ID is 20d1741b-61b6-ee11-ac7e-0a27ad48efdb. Is it possible that maybe the Addenda is not being passed to the downstream payments?
Hi @lucio,
I do see that the Addenda details were sent correctly with this transfer. However, Addenda isn’t 100% guaranteed to be displayed by the RDFI. it’s ultimately up to each individual bank to decide if they choose to display this information to the end user.
Understood. So if we ask a bank to display the ‘Addenda’ information, will they know what we are talking about? Or is it called something else on their end?
Hi @lucio , I think it’d depend on who you talk to at the bank. It’d likely be someone that’s familiar with how ACH is processed in the context of that specific bank. What I might recommend is to provide separate reporting for these users within the context of your own app, that way you can surface up more helpful metadata to the end-user.