Introduction

Our check/bill pay product allows you to pay bills from any Synapse-hosted account. We use checks for bill pay because they are accepted by all services and utility providers. This is important because it helps us ensure that our bill pay offering provides ubiquitous coverage.

Steps We Take

• We deduct the check amount from the relevant Synapse-hosted account at the moment of check issuance, thus eliminating any NSF (insufficient funds) exceptions.
  • We are able to do this because we know the account (node) balance when writing a check.
  • The funds will remain debited from the account until the check recipient cashes the check.
• Fonts used on our checks are optimized for improved OCR performance, thus removing any exception handling due to illegible type.
• Additionally, we verify addresses to reduce invalid address exceptions--you can also be proactive and use our Verify Address API call.
  • We are further developing processes to verify that addresses we send checks to are not present on sanctions lists.

Transaction (Node) Types: <<account_checkUS>>

Steps to Send a Check

1. Make sure your controls (what you are allowed to do in our system) allow for check issuance.
2. Have an account owned by a user who

• has SEND-AND-RECEIVE permissions and
• who is not a match in one of our sanctions lists click here for our guide on how to check for this.

3. Link a valid check recipient.
4. If all the steps above have been successfully executed you can now send a check.

• Please note that the payee/recipient should expect to receive the check in the mail within 8-10 business days.

Restoring Funds from Issued Checks

Stop a Check

You can "Delete" check transactions in every stage except SETTLED with our stop check API call. Funds will be credited back to the account the check was issued from.

Returned Checks

If a check is returned for any reason, then we will stop the check (delete the check transaction) and credit funds back to the account the check was issued from.

Voided Checks

We will automatically void a check if it has not been cashed after 90 days. Please make sure that your users are aware of this. When a check is automatically voided in this manner, funds will be credited back to the account that issued the check.

Cutoff times

Sub-Resources

• Fund & Send a Check
• Stop Check
• Create Check Recipient

Return Codes

• Check/RDC Return Codes