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Wallet Accounts (FBO)

Wallets are a way for banks to send and/or store money on behalf of third parties in certain instances. They can offer simplicity and ease of use for programs that involve lower balances and limited payment options. They can offer an on-ramp to more standard deposit accounts, offering companies a way to pilot, or offer narrowly-defined financial features to their customer bases to enhance loyalty and trust.

Key Concepts​

Routing and Account Numbers​

Every wallet is assigned a routingNumber and accountNumber at creation, just like a standard deposit account. These identifiers are always present on the wallet resource and can be used to address the wallet on supported payment rails.

Whether a wallet can actually send or receive external payments (ACH, wire, check) is governed by toggles on the associated Wallet Terms rather than by the account type itself. By default, these external-rail toggles are disabled — a freshly created wallet on walletDefault only supports book transfers between accounts at the same bank. Contact Unit to enable any external rails on a wallet terms.

Wallet Terms​

Each wallet is created using a specific wallet terms. Wallet terms are a predefined set of terms associated with this wallet (e.g. Fees, Limits, Card settings, and which payment rails the wallet can use).

Wallet terms include per-rail toggles that determine whether wallets created against the terms can participate in external payments — for example isAchDebitEnabled, isAchCreditEnabled, isWirePaymentsEnabled, and isCheckDepositEnabled. All of these default to disabled, which is why wallets are often described as "book-payment-only" out of the box. Enabling any of them turns on the corresponding external rail for every wallet created under that wallet terms.

Use walletDefault as the default value for the wallet terms field while building your solution in sandbox. Contact Unit to create other wallet terms under your organization.

Wallet Lifecycle​

A successful wallet creation will result in a wallet in Open status. Wallets can then be:

  • Frozen - Temporarily restricted, behaves like a closed wallet but can be unfrozen
  • Closed - Permanently closed (irreversible)
  • Reopened - Only wallets closed by customers can be reopened

Eligible Customers​

Wallets can be created for:

  • APIs - Create, update, and manage wallet accounts
  • Webhook Events - Webhook events for wallet lifecycle
  • Resources - JSON:API resource schema for wallets