Announcing Formance Connectivity

We are thrilled to introduce Formance Connectivity, a comprehensive service that enables seamless and adaptable integration with any type of payment, banking or financial services partners through the Formance platform.

What is Formance Connectivity?

Connectivity is a platform core service, designed to offer real-time integrations to a wide network of financial service providers, with read and write capabilities.

It provides a unified data model and API over multiple payments providers such as CurrencyCloud and Stripe, letting you bring your business logic home in the process of building complex flow of funds.

Initially known as Formance Payments, Connectivity has also evolved to support a broader set of financial services providers beyond payments, starting with modern financial infrastructure actors such as Modulr or BankingCircle.

How it works

Connectivity operates through a system of connectors, which serve as the mapping engine between the Formance Platform and financial service providers. Each connector is implemented to interact with the financial institution through its programmatic interface, abstracting and keeping minute details off your plate in the process.

All connectors share the same architecture and are built with our connector framework, streamlining the integration process.

Connectivity is the natural extension of our core Ledger service: as you will be representing your own financial data and creating an internal word within the Ledger service, Connectivity lets you connect this internal world to the outside world.

Having such a strong de-coupling between the real world and your ideal internal world allows for a clear separation of concerns, avoiding you to create dependencies to a specific provider that would otherwise become complex to untangle as you further scale beyond a single partner.

New in this release

Introducing reverse connectivity

This release comes with a wide range of native connectors, allowing drop-in integrations with many financial institutions and infrastructure providers such as Stripe, Adyen, Modulr, or Atlar.

If you want to bring your own partner and a connector is not yet available, in addition to creating a native connector with our framework, you can now quickly get started with the Generic Connector. This layer of abstraction enables integration with any financial institution no matter how obscure, through an interface proxy you can implement in any technology. This proxy acts as a gateway that handles Formance Connectivity requests and translates it to requests to the target interface.

Read more on starting your own generic connector here.

Temporal queries on source accounts

Another significant feature is the balance history querying, which through an internal data layer, reconstruct a virtual sequence of accounts states and allows for temporal queries.

This allows for things such as knowing what what your platform account balance as of ten minutes ago or yesterday, a data point that isn’t traditionally well exposed by the real-time interfaces of money movement services providers.

Allowing such temporal queries and history is instrumental when analyzing the state of your ledger vs the state of the external world, anchored at a specific point in time. Equipped with these capabilities, you can confidently start to produce high-quality reports and bring high-quality data to your financial operations and audit teams.

More information on accounts here.

Transfer initiations

The Connectivity service now also exposes the ability to conveniently transfer funds between your accounts or bank accounts on the associated payment service provider using Transfer Initiations, a unified abstraction for expressing external money movements. This primitive allows for both the orchestration of external payouts and internal treasury movements, enabling further more de-coupling between your business logic and the underlying concretising institutions.

The current version of the transfer initiation system supports two types of fund transfers:

• INTERNAL transfers, which allows you to move funds between your accounts held at a single financial institution. This is useful if you have multiple accounts and want to consolidate your funds or allocate them to different purposes.
• PAYOUT transfers, which enables you to transfer funds from your internal account to an external account. This is beneficial if you need to pay external vendors or suppliers or simply want to transfer funds to another bank account in your control.

Learn more about transfer initiations here.

Getting Started with Formance Connectivity

You can now deploy the Formance Connectivity service in its latest version to take advantage of its new features listed above. Our comprehensive documentation provides detailed reference on using the new Connectivity API, and the enhancements mentioned in this release note.

Join the Community

Formance wouldn’t exist without its open-source community: join our group of financial applications engineers to share your experiences, ask questions, and collaborate on best practices. Visit our Slack and GitHub repository to get involved.