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When architecting payment solutions, rigorous and extensive testing is not just beneficial, it’s imperative. In November of last year, a significant Federal Reserve processing glitch impacted around 900,000 payment transactions across three major US banks. What’s worse is it occurred on a payday, disrupting the direct deposit of wages and resulting in widespread inconvenience and stress.

One of the most crucial ongoing discussions we have at Moov—and I suspect at most startups—is how to make decisions around priorities and resources.

If I were still using paper checks, I’d write the date as 2020, because the last few years have been a blur. Somehow the world feels both suspended in time while making giant leaps in innovation at break-neck speeds. And even though I’d put Moov in the latter category, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture when you’re chasing the goals right in front of you

At Moov, when we design a new system, one of the first conversations we have is what communication methods it will utilize.

From a consumer’s perspective, debit and credit cards are relatively straightforward. You sign up for a card, and you use that card to pay for goods or services – either with money directly from your account (for debit card purchases) or with borrowed money that you’ll pay back (for credit card purchases).

It’s been said by many that “docs are the product” and that “docs are the most important part of the product.” We couldn’t agree more. What good is our product if developers don’t know how to use it? And do developers tend to read the docs, or do they search and skim? We know, because we’ve been in that position ourselves.

Performance, reliability, and maintainability are essential elements of everything we build here at Moov. In design discussions, we pay particular attention to how our services are defined and how information moves between them. Whether you are designing a new system or reasoning about an existing one, it’s helpful to think of it from two dimensions: the individual service definitions and the communication between them.

For those uninitiated in the alphabet soup of terminology that fintech serves for lunch daily: KYC refers to the process of Knowing Your Customer.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to re-examine daily life as we knew it. Because of this shift, fresh opportunities for innovation surfaced in many different sectors. Governments, companies, and families were forced to rethink how to conduct business, shop, and pay for things.

Founded in 1973, the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) network connects more than 11,000 financial institutions around the globe, enabling reliable wire transfers in a secure environment. SWIFT is owned by member institutions like banks, securities dealers, and clearing houses. Each member is assigned a unique code whose purpose is comparable to that of U.S. routing numbers and will be detailed throughout this article.

The Moov ACH Gateway is a customizable payment gateway that enables automated ACH operations including file uploading and downloading. When paired with our test harness, which acts as a financial institution, achgateway serves as the final puzzle piece for ACH transactions. It also utilizes Moov ACH by flattening batches, merging files, and validating files to ensure transfers are cost effective and reliable. We’ll cover how to set up the service and run through a sample use case in the sections below.

From currency converters to invoicing tools, the world of open source fintech is overflowing with interesting projects. We’ve put together a curated list of our favorites and hope you’ll add projects you love too. Please submit a pull request to add new projects to our GitHub repository—this blog post will be updated periodically to stay in sync with the repo.

The Moov ACH Test Harness project provides a configurable FTP/SFTP server to replicate real-world ACH file transfer scenarios like returns and changes. With the test harness acting as a receiving financial institution, matchers and actions can be customized to observe how ACH files would be processed in production. This project is a natural extension of our Moov ACH project, which allows users to read, write, and validate Nacha ACH files. We’ll cover how to get set up with the test harness and run through a few primary use cases in the sections below.

The Moov Watchman project provides search functionality over U.S. trade sanctions lists, including individuals, groups, and companies legally forbidden to transact with. While the project’s primary API documentation contains plenty of technical details and examples, the purpose of this guide is to serve as a launching point for new users. We’ll cover how to perform a few types of Watchman searches and how to update an entry’s status using our API service.

The Moov Metro2 project offers an API with several operations for Metro 2 credit reporting files, including bidirectional conversion between plaintext and JSON formats. While the project’s primary API documentation contains plenty of technical details and examples, the purpose of this guide is to serve as a launching point for new users. We’ll run through a few basic examples of converting and validating Metro 2 files.

The Moov Fed project provides search functionality over Fedwire and FedACH participant data, which includes financial institution routing information. While the project’s primary API documentation contains plenty of technical details and examples, the purpose of this guide is to serve as a launching point for new users. We’ll cover how to mount your own data files and perform a few basic searches using our API service.

The Moov ACH project includes an API with several operations for ACH files, including bidirectional conversion between plaintext and JSON formats. While the project’s primary API documentation contains plenty of technical details and examples, the purpose of this guide is to serve as a launching point for new users. We’ll run through a few basic examples of creating, fetching, modifying, and validating files.

The Moov Wire project offers an API with several operations for Fedwire messages, including bidirectional conversion between plaintext and JSON formats. While the project’s primary API documentation contains plenty of technical details and examples, the purpose of this guide is to serve as a launching point for new users. We’ll run through a few basic examples of creating, fetching, deleting, and modifying files.

The Moov ImageCashLetter project features an API with several operations for X9 files, including bidirectional conversion between ASCII/EBCDIC and JSON formats. While the project’s primary API documentation contains plenty of technical details and examples, the purpose of this guide is to serve as a launching point for new users. We’ll run through a few basic examples of creating, fetching, deleting, and modifying files.

In this post, we explain what an ACH payment is, who the key players involved are, and provide resources for getting started accepting ACH payments.

Real-time payments (RTP) is a payments network owned by The Clearing House (TCH). RTP enables 24/7 real-time electronic payments in the US, meaning you can transfer and receive funds immediately over its network at any time.

The number one question I get about regarding the Moov open source libraries is, “How do these fit into my application stack?” In this post, we’ll set out to answer this question once and for all. Before we talk specifically about our open source projects, it’s essential to look more broadly at how most companies interact with the banking system programmatically.

The world of open source software (OSS) is booming. OSS dependencies live in every corner of the digital products we use daily, yet many projects lack a reliable maintenance and contribution plan.

Last week we hosted two conversations for the Moov community. The famous Cokie Hasiotis from Fintech Today joined us for happy hour. For our first Moov Global Community conversation, we spoke with Simon Taylor of 11:FS.

We recently welcomed Zach Bruhnke the CEO/Janitor at HMBradley to be a speaker at our Moov weekly happy hour. Zach is a longtime member of the Moov community and fintech veteran. He spoke on a broad range of topics in the challenger bank space, and his ideas were so good we decided to write them up to share with the community.

How and when to use the Moov ACH library The Moov team was founded by industry veterans who have been dealing with legacy technology for decades. It’s this experience that led to the creation of our open source projects like ACH. What we noticed was that teams across the financial industry are consistently solving the same problem, often causing huge headaches. The information around how to solve these problems is freely available but it’s buried in lengthy manuals and layers upon layers of insider jargon.

The recap This month marked the first meetings of the Moov ACH and ICL working groups. Our first of many ongoing monthly meetings where community members come together and discuss how we can improve our open source projects. These meetings started a few weeks ago when one community member asked a question about mobile check capture. What resulted was a lengthy discussion and, finally, a suggestion to host a call.

Getting started Building ACH files is no small task. The sheer number of fields required is enough to make your head spin. This tutorial will use our Node SDK and a CSV of mock employee payroll data to generate a Nacha compliant PPD ACH file.

In Part 1 we covered how to update our README and GitHub Pages documentation. In this article, we’ll map out how to quickly and easily suggest changes to our API documentation.

The documentation for our open source projects is here to serve you, the community. We’re always interested in feedback from those using our open source libraries and incredibly thankful to anyone willing to contribute to them. In this article, we’ll map out how to quickly and easily suggest changes to our documentation.