The Apex Cash service facilitates the movement of cash through various banking technologies and assesses the risk associated with each transaction.
About Apex Cash Services
Apex Cash is the product set to manage cash transfers for all your accounts. Through its APIs, Apex Cash supports fully automated deposits and withdrawals, and enables immediate funding using Instant Account Verification (IAV). When matched with Apex Accounts, our industry-leading instant account opening product, Apex Cash allows investors to open an account, deposit funds, and start trading in minutes.
Supported Cash Transactions
- Instant Cash Transfers
- Automated Clearing House (ACH) deposits and withdrawals
- Scheduled ACH Transfers
- Wire withdrawals
- Check withdrawals
- First-party Cash journals between customer accounts
- Fees and Credits
- Wire Deposits
Included Features
- Instant Cash Transfers is our proprietary product to instantly move cash between investor brokerage accounts and your partner financial institutions.
- Instant ACH account verification using our IAV partners such as Plaid or Yodlee.
- Account verification via Micro Deposits
- Scheduled ACH Transfers for both future one-time transfers and recurring schedules (e.g., Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, etc.)
- Your company name and an informative description appear on investor bank statements for ACH transfers.
- Real-time funding – deposits are immediately available for trading.
- Risk checks that protect you and your customers against fraud and money laundering Retirement tax accounting.
- Specify tax withholding information when depositing money into your customers’ retirement accounts.
- Retrieve bank instruction details for wires that were deposited into your investors’ accounts.
- Real-time transfer status updates via Apex Events.
Same-Day Credit
How can Apex give you instant buying power when our competitors don’t allow you to trade until the next business day? Apex has data on millions of ACH transactions and after analysis, we’ve determined there is little additional return risk when giving same day credit vs. waiting until the next day. However, that delay means a lot to you and your customer.
ACH
ACH is a way to move money between banks without using paper checks, wire transfers, credit card networks, or cash. ACH transactions are by far the most popular method for transferring money at Apex. Our Cash API supports ACH deposits and withdrawals for Apex accounts with verified ACH relationships.
How ACHs Work
Before initiating a deposit from a customer’s bank account into their trading account, Apex must establish that the customer has legitimate authority over that bank account. We refer to the legitimate connection of a customer’s brokerage account to their bank account as an ACH relationship. Apex supports two fully API-driven methods for establishing ACH relationships: Instant Account Verification (IAV) and micro deposits.
The easiest, fastest, and most convenient way to verify your customer’s banking information is by using Instant Account Verification (IAV). The typical IAV workflow allows investors to enter their banking credentials directly into an IAV form that never touches your servers. Upon successful verification, you get a token to refer to that user’s banking data (account #, ABA #, etc.). To establish the ACH relationship at Apex, simply provide the token as well as the bank account and routing number, and you are all set. You can immediately start using the ACH relationship to fund your customer’s account and Apex immediately gives your customer buying power for that deposit.
ACH Workflow
Instant Cash Transfer
The Apex Cash service provides an instant cash transfer API for banking programs to initiate deposits and withdrawals and cancel or check the status of existing cash transfers. Instant Cash Transfers facilitate funds movements, which are transfers of cash between a customer-owned account and the customer's investment account. The Apex investment account and the contra account must have the same account registration.
Below video describes our Instant Cash Transfer process.
Cash Journal
The Cash API provides cash journal transfers as a programmatic way for clients to move cash between Apex investor accounts which have the same owner, when both accounts are owned by the same client (i.e. broker-dealer or RIA). Clients can then provide a way for their account holders to fund one account from another, such as funding a brokerage or college fund account from their linked Apex account.
A cash journal transfer is considered "first-party"
- If the source and destination accounts are both Apex accounts registered to the same client.
- Both accounts must also have the same named account owner(s).
Wires and Checks
The Cash API supports wire withdrawals and deposits to/from customer accounts. The wire transfer service supports several features specific to this transfer mechanism. The Cash API also supports sending check withdrawals from customer accounts.
Fees and Credits
The Cash API provides endpoints to allow clients to submit a fee to charge for a variety of services or to issue a credit to account holders, reducing the possibility of negative equity at the start of the next business day.
Risk Checks
Apex Cash analyzes various attributes of both the brokerage account and its cash movement history to build a unique risk profile for each transfer. Above a threshold, Apex reviews the transfer to mitigate risk. Attributes considered include (but are not limited to):
- Age of brokerage account
- Percentage of a withdrawal compared to the overall value of the brokerage account Transfers in the last 60 days
- Source vs destination of funds
- Other pending withdrawals