7 Business Functions Made Easier with an Account Information API

Manual document uploads. Delayed verifications. Incomplete financial data. For years, these have been the bottlenecks slowing down business operations across industries, from onboarding and credit checks to payouts and compliance reviews.

But a better method is now widely available: the account information API.

This API connects directly to a customer’s bank account with full consent and returns verified financial data in real time. It replaces outdated paperwork with clean, structured bank information that’s ready to use across your systems.

Whether you’re verifying a bank account, assessing income, or confirming source of funds, an account information API gives you bank-verified data at the point of need, without chasing PDFs or relying on unverified input.

In this guide, we’ll break down seven real-world business functions that now run better, faster, and more securely thanks to this API-powered access to live bank data.

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1. Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is one of the biggest drop-off points in regulated industries. Asking users to upload documents like bank statements or manually enter financial details introduces unnecessary friction and increases error rates.

An account information API removes these barriers by letting users connect their bank accounts securely and instantly. The API returns verified personal and financial data directly from the source, pre-filled and ready to use.

What You Can Do with an Account Information API:

• Instantly verify account ownership and identity
• Auto-fill KYC fields like name, address, sort code, and account number
• Reduce fraud risk by checking against real-time bank data
• Cut onboarding time from days to minutes

Example Use Case:
A UK-based investment platform uses an account information API to onboard customers without requesting utility bills or PDFs. Customers grant consent, connect their bank, and the platform instantly retrieves verified identity and account details. This shortened the onboarding process by over 80% and significantly reduced customer drop-offs, especially on mobile.

📚 Guide: How to Onboard Faster Using Open banking

2. Credit & Risk Assessment

Credit scoring models often rely on outdated data and self-reported information, offering limited visibility into a person’s real financial situation. This can lead to poor risk assessments, higher defaults, or unjustified declines.

An account information API gives your credit team access to live transaction data directly from the applicant’s bank, showing actual income patterns, spending behaviour, overdraft usage, and savings activity. Unlike static credit files, this data reflects how the applicant is managing their finances today.

What You Can Do with an Account Information API:

• Confirm income from salaries, benefits, or self-employment
• Spot risky behaviours like repeated overdrafts or gambling
• Analyse affordability with a real-time view of cash flow
• Make credit decisions based on current financial health, not assumptions

Example Use Case:
A UK-based alternative lender uses an account information API to replace traditional credit files for thin-file applicants. When a customer connects their bank account, the system analyses 90 days of transaction history to confirm stable income and spending patterns. This allows the lender to safely approve applicants who would have otherwise been declined by credit score alone, expanding their eligible customer base while managing risk effectively.

3. Payroll and Contractor Payment Validation

Paying the wrong bank account, especially in payroll or contractor disbursement, can lead to delayed payments, manual rework, and strained relationships. Most businesses rely on employees or vendors to manually enter their account details, but even a small error in the sort code or account number can cause a payment failure.

An account information API helps eliminate this risk by verifying account details directly with the user’s bank before a payment is initiated. It confirms account ownership and matches input data against bank records in real time.

What You Can Do with an Account Information API:

• Confirm that a bank account exists and belongs to the intended recipient
• Prevent errors in sort code and account number entry
• Validate business accounts for B2B contractor payments
• Improve payment success rates and reduce operational overhead

Example Use Case:
A UK-based payroll provider integrates an account information API to validate bank details during employee onboarding. When a new hire submits their account information, the system verifies the name, account number, and sort code directly with the bank before payroll is processed. This reduced payment errors by over 90% and eliminated the need for post-payment corrections.

4. Compliance and AML Reviews

AML compliance requires more than just ticking boxes; it demands accurate, timely insights into a customer’s financial behaviour. Relying on uploaded PDFs or self-reported income leaves firms exposed to gaps in data, backlogs in review, and higher fraud risk.

By using an account information API, compliance teams can access real-time financial data sourced directly from the customer’s bank. This ensures reviews are based on actual transaction activity, not outdated or incomplete documents.

What You Can Do:

• Verify income and fund sources from 90+ days of transaction history
• Detect suspicious activity such as unexplained deposits or rapid balance changes
• Support source-of-funds validation without requesting paper statements
• Maintain a full audit trail for regulators with timestamped data access

Example Use Case:
A UK-based claims management firm needed to verify the legitimacy of financial compensation applications. By integrating a financial data API, the firm now reviews live bank data for unusual income spikes, mismatched payer names, or fund transfers from high-risk jurisdictions. This reduced manual document handling and strengthened their audit readiness ahead of FCA reviews.

5. Insurance & Claims Validation

Insurers and claims handlers often face two critical challenges: verifying the legitimacy of a claim and processing it quickly enough to meet customer expectations. When customers are asked to upload bank statements or income documents, the process slows down, and the risk of document fraud increases.

By using an account information API, insurers can securely access transaction data from the claimant’s bank, with full user consent. This provides instant visibility into account activity, income patterns, and fund flows, without relying on manipulated or outdated paperwork.

What this improves:

• Confirm income loss or employment status through verified deposits
• Detect signs of inflated or false claims using transaction patterns
• Speed up claim approvals by removing document wait times
• Improve fraud detection while enhancing customer experience

Example Use Case:
A UK-based income protection insurer integrated bank data access into its claims process. Instead of requesting payslips or employer letters, the claimant connects their bank account through a secure portal. The insurer then verifies recent income patterns directly and flags inconsistencies in real time, cutting the average claim processing time by over 40%.

6. Subscription Management & Collections

Missed payments and failed direct debits are a major source of churn in subscription businesses. Whether you run a SaaS platform, gym membership system, or invoicing service, recovering failed payments usually involves guesswork, chasing expired cards or retrying accounts without knowing why they failed.

With access to transaction-level data, you can identify issues before they affect your cash flow. Businesses can review whether the customer’s account is active, whether recent transactions indicate fund availability, or if there’s been a pattern of failed payments, all using live data with customer consent.

What this improves:

• Identify dormant or inactive bank accounts before setting up mandates
• Flag accounts with insufficient funds or repeated chargebacks
• Time retries for better success rates based on real payment behaviour
• Reduce reliance on cards and improve first-time collection success via bank payments

Example Use Case:
A UK-based fitness platform that bills members monthly used transaction-level data to reduce failed payment rates. By checking account activity before submitting direct debits, the system now avoids billing accounts with no recent deposits, triggering smart retries only when conditions are right. This cut their payment failure rate by 38% without changing their payment provider.

7. Financial Analytics & Business Decisioning

Most analytics tools are built on top of historical accounting data, which often lags by days or weeks. That delay can make it hard to respond to cash flow changes, customer risk, or funding needs in real time, especially in fast-moving sectors like lending, fintech, and marketplaces.

With direct bank account insights, your business gains access to live, structured transaction data, enabling faster, data-driven decisions across risk, operations, and growth planning. Unlike stale reports, bank data reflects how customers, suppliers, or borrowers are behaving financially right now.

What this improves:

• Monitor daily cash flow across connected accounts
• Feed real-time financial data into underwriting or credit models
• Spot trends in user behaviour before they appear in P&L reports
• Improve scenario planning based on actual income and spending patterns

Example Use Case:
A UK-based invoice finance platform uses bank account insights to monitor client revenue flows in real time. By tracking incoming payments and comparing them to prior invoice cycles, the platform can trigger funding top-ups automatically, helping businesses access working capital faster without manual intervention.

How Finexer Supports These Business Functions

If you’re looking to integrate an account information API that performs reliably across regulated business functions, onboarding, credit checks, AML, payroll, or claims, Finexer provides a stable, UK-compliant solution designed for real-world teams.

Finexer’s API gives your business access to bank-verified financial data from leading UK banks, with features tailored to operational use:

• Verify account ownership, identity, and income directly from live bank data
• Fetch permissioned transaction history for AML, affordability, and claims validation
• Connect to all major UK banks with high availability and stable response times
• Receive 3–5 weeks of hands-on support during onboarding to ensure your implementation is correct, compliant, and fully tested before going live
• Deploy 2–3x faster than typical market timelines, with minimal internal overhead

Whether you’re building for compliance, credit decisioning, or contractor payments, Finexer delivers the financial data infrastructure needed to reduce manual work and make faster, verified decisions.