Your program and accounts at Lithic each have their own balances and history of financial transactions (e.g., card transactions, ACH funding) that contributed to that balance. This information is captured by the Financial Accounts object.

There are three types of financial accounts:

• ISSUING: represents balance and financial transaction history for funds set aside for settling card transactions
• OPERATING: represents balance and financial transaction history for funds not used to fund or operate card programs
• RESERVE: represents balance and financial transaction history for your reserve funds

Your program by default has an ISSUING, a RESERVE, and an OPERATING financial account. These financial accounts are issued their own routing and account numbers that allows them to process ACH transactions.

Depending on your program's use case, Lithic will also generate additional financial accounts and balances for your customers and/or their end-users. In some cases, these financial accounts will also be issued routing and account numbers while in others they will act as virtual wallets to track balances. You can determine whether a financial account can track ACH by querying our Financial Accounts API. Below are some common use cases and account structures:

Corporate Incentive

Corporate incentive programs can track reward balances by:

• End-users for cases where rewards are recurring
• Card for cases where rewards are issued one-time

For rewards tracked by end-users, once you enroll your end-user, Lithic will generate separate ISSUING and OPERATING financial account for your end-user that is independent from your program’s financial accounts. All cards generated for an account are funded by the account’s ISSUING financial account only; funds in the OPERATING account cannot be used to authorize card transactions:

For rewards tracked by card, you will first enroll your end-user and create a card for them. Then, you can load funds onto the card through Lithic's Transfer endpoint. Lithic will track the balance for that specific card independent of activity on other cards issued to the end-user; each card has their own balance:

Disbursement

Similar to corporate incentive programs, Lithic will generate ISSUING and OPERATING financial accounts for each recipient that is enrolled as an end-user:

Prepaid Spend Management

For spend management programs that manage funds on behalf of their business clients, each enrolled business will receive ISSUING and OPERATING financial accounts with routing and account numbers. This enables businesses to directly fund an account at Lithic held for their benefit via ACH. Businesses can then enroll their employees through Lithic's KYC-exempt endpoint and have all employee card spend tracked against the balance in their issuing financial account:

If you want to learn more about how financial accounts can be used to manage your program, check out our guide on Quick Start - Accounts & Money Management.

Financial Account Schema

{
	"token": String,
	"created": String,
	"updated": String,
	"type": String,
	"routing_number": String,
	"account_number": String
}

List Financial Accounts

List the details of the financial accounts for a program or a given end-user account. This endpoint can only be used for financial accounts that are managed by the program associated with the calling API key. If an account_token is passed as a query parameter, then the endpoint returns a list of financial account objects associated with that end-user account.

GET https://api.lithic.com/v1/financial_accounts

Sample Request

curl https://api.lithic.com/v1/financial_accounts \
  -H 'Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY'

Sample Response

{
  "data": [
    {
      "token": "3fa85f64-5717-4562-b3fc-2c963f66afa6",
      "created": "2022-07-18T15:22:56.548Z",
      "updated": "2022-07-18T15:22:56.548Z",
      "type": "ISSUING",
      "routing_number": "string",
      "account_number": "string"
    },
    {
      "token": "f83j4ng0-5817-bf62-c3d0-4b963d76f09p",
      "created": "2022-07-18T15:22:56.548Z",
      "updated": "2022-07-18T15:22:56.548Z",
      "type": "RESERVE",
      "routing_number": "string",
      "account_number": "string"
    },
    {
      "token": "b03ging0-5gh7-9062-d8760-4bfu7593kndy",
      "created": "2022-07-18T15:22:56.548Z",
      "updated": "2022-07-18T15:22:56.548Z",
      "type": "OPERATING",
      "routing_number": "string",
      "account_number": "string"
    }
  ],
  "has_more": false
}

Create Financial Accounts

For use cases (e.g., bill pay) that require multiple financial accounts per program or given end-user account, this endpoint can be used to create those additional financial accounts.

POST  https://api.lithic.com/v1/financial_accounts

Sample Request

curl https://api.lithic.com/v1/financial_accounts \
	-X POST \
  -H "Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	-d '
{
	"account_token": "448cf9eb-e644-4acc-bdac-2b09ed5f77b7",
	"type": "OPERATING",
	"nickname": "Vendor ABC"
}
'

Sample Response

{
  "account_number": "string",
  "created": "2024-02-22T18:44:48.231Z",
  "nickname": "string",
  "routing_number": "string",
  "token": "3fa85f64-5717-4562-b3fc-2c963f66afa6",
  "type": "OPERATING",
  "updated": "2024-02-22T18:44:48.231Z"
}

Enumerations

Financial_accounts.type