Get Started: Steps to Integrate GoCardless Bank Account Data API into your application - For Free

Follow these steps and you'll get your integration with GoCardless Bank Account Data API running in no time. 

Steps to get started with Bank Account Data service:

1. Invite your team to join as users
2. Try with your account
3. Integrate API
4. Build a bank selection UI for your end users
5. Configure consent page UI (Available for Pay As You Go plan)
6. Contact GoCardless to verify your account (Available for Pay As You Go plan)

Take 10-20 minutes on each step per day to get set up in a few days, or be an overachiever and knock through all of them in 1-2 hours.

Step 1. Invite your team to join as users

By signing up, you've created a company account on the platform. If you're a one man company, feel free to skip skip this step, but in most cases, there will be multiple stakeholders involved in building the integration (product, UX/UI, data science and developer folks, for instance), so you need to invite everyone who will need access to the dashboard. 

To do that, please follow these steps.

1. Log into your account on the Open Banking portal
2. Visit the Company section
3. Click "Invite Member", type in their Name and Email, and hit "Invite member"

A couple of things to note.

• As the person who setup the account, you automatically become an "admin", while all new users you invite will have "member" permissions. If you ever need to change permissions sets, please contact our support team for assistance on this.
• Once you invite a new user, they will appear in users list with a "pending" tag, until they've verified their email and finished sign up. 
• If you have sent an invitation by mistake, you can revoke pending invites in the Company section.

Step 2. Try with your account

Next up, to get a feel for the end user journey, and the API output, we suggest you try connecting your own bank account in a simple interface that's available in the platform. 

To do this, please follow these steps.

1. Visit Developers > My Account Data section of the portal
2. Click "Connect New Bank"
3. Select the country
4. Select your bank from the list of banks provided
5. Provide your consent
6. Authenticate securely in your bank
7. Once redirected back to the Open Banking portal, view/download data from your linked account(s)

Accounts connected via My Account Data are not linked to your company account and will not be visible to other users within your company. If you wish to unlink a connected account, simply click the three dots next to the account listed, and select "Delete Account".

Can't find your bank listed?

Feel free to send a request our way, and we will try our best to make it happen: How can I request a new integration?

Step 3. Integrate API

Now that you've finished setting up your account and tried the customer journey yourself, it's time to get started on the API. The simple 6-step instructions for how to connect your first account via API programmatically are neatly outlined in our Quickstart Guide. This step will require software development experience or at least basic skill of using Postman. Please note that you should get your API credentials from your account on the platform.

Got stuck?

If any steps in Quickstart Guide are confusing and you can't seem to get it working, please contact our support team.

Step 4. Build a bank selection UI for your end users

Congrats on connecting the first account via API! 

Now it's time to build the bank selection UI - a front end interface where end users of your application will be able to select the banks they wish to connect. We have a detailed guide on how to build a bank selection UI in our API documentation, but below you'll find some of the highlights. 

Unlike many other providers, we don't impose a fixed iframe that you have to use, therefore giving you more control over how you want this step to look within your application. That being said, we do provide the equivalent of an iframe for companies that are short on time or have basic UI requirements.

Some considerations if you decide to build UI from scratch.

• Have a clear call to action e.g. "Select your bank".
• Include additional support text if necessary. It's twice more likely that the end user goes through Open Banking journey if the value proposition is stated clearly.
• Show available banks. Considerations: 
  • Show both the logo and the name of a bank;
  • Sort banks in alphabetical order or by popularity;
  • You can list all available banks in a given country or select only those ones that are used by your customer base;
  • If the bank list is not extensive, show banks in a grid form instead of listing all banks.
• Add a search bar for better UX.
• Use styles that fit with the rest of your application.

Additional steps that are available with our

Pay As You Go plan. 

More information about the plan: here.

Step 5. Configure consent page UI

As part of their customer journey, your end users will be redirected to GoCardless screen to give consent for accessing their bank account information. To improve conversions on this step, we encourage clients to configure the styling of the consent step to match to your own branding more closely. We have built a simple interface that allows you to do this without coding. 

To configure the UI, do the following.

1. Visit UI configuration section in the Open Banking portal.
2. Play around with the colour scheme of different elements using either colour codes or simply finding a colour in the chart;
3. You will see all changes dynamically in the preview block. Once you're happy with the look, just press "Publish to production" and the configured colour scheme will be applied to consent step for all end users going through the journey. 

Here are some additional things to consider when creating a customized UI: User Conversions. 

* After this step you are good to proceed with testing/using the service on the free plan (50 requisitions per month) and if it's needed, there are further features you can access when upgrading to paid.

Step 6. Contact us to verify your account

When signing up to GoCardless's Bank Account Data portal you will be required to provide details on your company or about yourself in case you intend to use our service for private purposes. The name of your company will be shown to end users while connecting their accounts. When signing up your account you will have "Non-verified" status and end users will see an informative message. 

Account verification is available in our paid plans. If you'd like to go live and remove the informative banner, you may request an upgrade to the Pay as You Go plan, or contact sales. Our team will contact you to confirm your details and once complete your account will be upgraded and the banner removed. The requests are processed within 2 business days.
While the verification is not available for the free plan, you can still use the product, with our Free plan. In such case the end users will see the message below when connecting their accounts.