Financial Data APIs: duplicate transaction fix

Greetings Financial Data API (CAD) Developers!

We are testing a new fix to solve for duplicate transactions in our Financial Data APIs.

A small number of banks are having duplicate transaction issues caused by changes the bank makes to the transaction after it’s initially posted. As we looked across the Intuit ecosystem on how to handle this thorny issue, we found our colleagues working on bank data down under (Australia) had pioneered a fix that we’re eager to try out with our developers.

Why are duplicates created
Some financial institutions (FIs) change the content of the transactions on their websites after they are originally posted and retrieved by the FD API, thus causing the same transactions to get retrieved a second time due to differences in descriptions, posted dates, etc.

The “correctAction” attribute
Transactions that were once returned, but now no longer exist in the bank in that same format will be returned with “D” (for delete) under the correctAction. This attribute has been documented, but not previously populated. The newer updated transactions will continue to be returned in the same way they are today.

Developers can choose to implement logic based on the correctAction attribute and delete the old defunct transactions. Other developers might choose to serve up a message to the user explaining that these transactions have been removed from the bank site and to take further action depending on the functionality of your application.

Limited roll out and your feedback
We are experimenting with this logic starting on Feb. 16, 2016 and only with USAA (2875), BBVA Compass (3144).

We are doing a limited roll out for 1 month and looking for developer feedback.

Please share your input via this survey.

We’ll collectively weigh all the feedback to decide if we roll out this change to additional FIs.

Going, going, going and duplicates gone … over and out!

Questions or comments? Share them on our developer forums!