Account and Proxy Management

Overview

This page covers the functionality provided by Electrum to help you manage account validation and proxy resolution and enrichment for inbound payments.

Electrum provides an account mirroring service to help partners with the authorisation step of inbound payments. This allows Electrum to check the validity of the beneficiary account for all incoming credit transfer requests, and respond directly to the scheme operator. The main benefit of this is to take network traffic and processing load off your core banking system.

In addition to verifying account details, the account mirror also supports proxy resolution and enrichment for inbound PayShap transactions.

The following data is stored on the account mirror:

• Account identifier
• Account status
• Account owner "known as" name
• Account owner "FICA" name
• Account opening date
• Proxy and domain links (where applicable)

Supported Schemes

Managing the Account Mirror

Where Electrum is required to host a mirror of your accountholder data, you will need to ensure that the data stored there is kept up to date. Electrum provides a set of API operations for this purpose. Refer to the sections below for guidelines on what functionality needs to be implemented for RTC and PayShap.

Implementing for RTC

Depending on your business requirements, The Electrum account mirror will act as a secondary store of the data required to validate inbound RTC payments.

Implementing for PayShap

The Electrum platform provides three options to support PayShap proxy management. The solution you will need to implement (A, B, or C below) will be determined by your business requirements, as communicated with Electrum.

A. Electrum as secondary store of proxy data

The participant holds the master account data, including proxy information, and synchronises this with an account mirror on the Electrum platform.

When updates are made to the master account data, these need to be pushed to the Electrum mirror using the operations specified by the Electrum API.

Registering or deregistering a proxy with the scheme is also done via the Electrum API. In this case, Electrum passes the request on to the scheme operator and returns the result to the participant. However, Electrum does not update its account mirror to reflect the outcome of that operation. The participant must first update its master account record, and then communicate the change to Electrum with a separate API call.

Electrum performs proxy resolution and enrichment for inbound payment requests internally against the account mirror.

B. Electrum as primary store of proxy data

The participant holds the master account data, excluding proxy information, and synchronises this with an account mirror on the Electrum platform. Electrum maintains the only store of proxy-account links on its account mirror.

Updates to the master account records are pushed to Electrum in the same way as for solution A above, but registration and deregistration with the scheme are handled differently.

Proxy registration/deregistration requests from the participant's customer channel are routed to the scheme operator. Electrum updates its proxy-account link upon successful response from the scheme and returns the response to the participant for informational purposes. The participant does not, however, need to store the proxy-account link in its master account record.

Electrum performs proxy resolution and enrichment for inbound payment requests in the same way as for solution A above.

C. No account or proxy mirroring

The participant holds the only store of account data, including proxy information.

There is no involvement from Electrum in managing account-proxy information, with the exception of when a proxy needs to be registered or deregistered with the scheme. This is done via the Electrum API, which routes the requests to the scheme operator and returns the response to the participant without performing any additional processing.

For incoming payment requests, Electrum calls the participant's account management system in order to perform proxy resolution and enrichment.