CODEWITHSUNDEEP
balanced-payments
zealoushacker
zealoushacker

Reputation: 6906

Balanced duplicate bank account detection

I've create a new merchant account on Balanced via the API. I added a bank account to this account and then tokenized the exact same bank account and then added that again. I was expecting the second association to throw a 409 telling me that the account could not be added.

I have two questions:

  1. Why does the API allow me to add the exact same bank account / card to an account twice?
  2. How can I detect this and not add the bank account / card to the account?

Here is the example of two bank accounts I've created on an account via the Ruby gem:

irb(main):029:0> @bank_accounts.items.each { |a| 
  puts "#{a["bank_name"]} #{a["bank_code"]} created-#{a["created_at"]} #{a["last_four"]} uri=#{a["uri"]} id=#{a["id"]}"
}; nil
123456789 created-2012-07-11T23:36:57.290555Z 2333 uri=/v1/marketplaces/TEST-MP4Z4RaRDF6TWqeupiVUSu8m/accounts/AC2tip2eDhi92THXXEkIdys1/bank_accounts/BA2mP9GtEPVB3v9DzWJ7ZH8B id=BA2mP9GtEPVB3v9DzWJ7ZH8B
123456789 created-2012-07-11T23:37:22.655007Z 2333 uri=/v1/marketplaces/TEST-MP4Z4RaRDF6TWqeupiVUSu8m/accounts/AC2tip2eDhi92THXXEkIdys1/bank_accounts/BA2PlMIVFyMSSzo2zzUZb2XA id=BA2PlMIVFyMSSzo2zzUZb2XA
=> nil

Upvotes: 0

Views: 344

Answers (1)

mjallday
mjallday

Reputation: 10092

  1. There is no constraint on adding duplicate bank accounts and cards as you note. This was a decision made to allow the developer to lessen the burden of writing code for catching duplicate bank accounts. Your feedback is noted and appreciated.

  2. You can index the cards or bank accounts associated with a user, Balanced does not return the full card number but by comparing the last_four, expiration, and name you can tell if a card is a match, similar fields are available for bank accounts but swap expiration with bank_code (routing number).

    The code to do something like this in Ruby would be:

    require 'balanced'

Balanced.configure 'e1c5ad38d1c711e1b36c026ba7e239a9'

# duplicate cards
card1 =  Balanced::Card.new(:card_number=>"4111111111111111", :expiration_month=>"12", :expiration_year=>"2020").save()  # original card
card2 =  Balanced::Card.new(:card_number=>"4111111111111111", :expiration_month=>"12", :expiration_year=>"2020").save()  # our duplicate card
card3 =  Balanced::Card.new(:card_number=>"4111111111111111", :expiration_month=>"12", :expiration_year=>"2021").save()  # a different card

# create a new account
buyer = Balanced::Account.new(:email_address => '%[email protected]' % Time.now).save()
buyer.add_card(card1.uri)

# helper function
def has_card(cards, card)
   cards.map { |c| c.last_four == card.last_four && c.expiration_month == card.expiration_month && c.expiration_year == card.expiration_year }.include? true
end

puts 'buyer already has this card' if has_card(buyer.cards, card2)
puts 'buyer does not have this card' if not has_card(buyer.cards, card3)

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions