Concepts

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Entities

An entity is a legal entity that has authorized access to the Swift API. Entities are assigned an admin with a superuser role over the entire entity.

When you onboard with Swift, you’ll create an entity, an admin, and provision permissioned API keys for your entity.

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External Accounts

An external account represents a bank account owned by an entity held external to Swift. These are used for destinations for outgoing transfers. They can be connected and verified during account onboarding.

External accounts are identified by a routing_number and account_number. External accounts can be RTP and/or FedNow-enabled, allowing for outgoing transfers with these respective instant payment rails. Otherwise, outgoing transfers can be initiated via ACH and FedWire.

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Accounts

An account is a virtual representation of a real-world bank account that is held with one of our partner banks. An account is the source-of-funds for all outgoing transactions and is the recipient of all incoming transactions.

Each account has an independently accounted ledger, and its balance can be viewed in the Swift Dashboard, via the /accounts/balance API, or derived from the set of transactions affecting that account.

Push payments debit the account’s balance, so the account must have sufficient funds to cover the payment. Accounts can be pre-funded by a wire transfer, ACH push, or an RTP push payment.

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Users

Users are the end users of your application. Users must be KYC’d as agreed to in your onboarding process.

Users must have bank accounts or other payment methods connected and verified (again as agreed to in your onboarding process) in order to initiate a Request for Payment to them.

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Events

Events are an immutable record of all events that have occurred on your entity. This can be used to build reactive applications that respond to events as they occur. For more information, see the Events and Webhooks guide.