Step 1: Creating your Customer #

Choose the Customer Type for Your Funds Flow #

Before your end user can send or receive funds to their connected bank account, they must be created as a Customer via the Dwolla API. With this funds flow, however, the only eligible Customer types are:

• Verified Personal Customers
• Verified Business Customers

To learn more on the differences between personal and business verified Customers and the capabilities of each, check out our developer resource article.

Step 1A. Create the Customer #

While both the Personal and Business verified Customer types are valid in this funds flow, we will be creating a Personal verified Customer in this guide.

Request Parameters - Personal Verified Customer

Request and response (view schema in ‘raw’)

POST https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/customers
Content-Type: application/vnd.dwolla.v1.hal+json
Accept: application/vnd.dwolla.v1.hal+json
Authorization: Bearer pBA9fVDBEyYZCEsLf/wKehyh1RTpzjUj5KzIRfDi0wKTii7DqY

{
  "firstName": "John",
  "lastName": "Doe",
  "email": "johndoe@nomail.net",
  "ipAddress": "10.10.10.10",
  "type": "personal",
  "address1": "99-99 33rd St",
  "city": "Some City",
  "state": "NY",
  "postalCode": "11101",
  "dateOfBirth": "1970-01-01",
  "ssn": "1234"
}

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Location: https://api.dwolla.com/customers/FC451A7A-AE30-4404-AB95-E3553FCD733F

When the Customer is successfully created on your application, you will receive a 201 HTTP response with an empty response body. You can reference the Location header to retrieve a link that represents the created Customer resource. We recommend storing the full URL for future use, as it will be needed for actions such as attaching a bank or correlating webhooks that are triggered for the user in the Dwolla system.

Step 1B: Handle Webhooks #

If you have an active webhook subscription, you will receive the customer_created and customer_verified webhook immediately after the resource has been created.

Additional expected behavior #

Customer Statuses #

Not all Customers will have a verified status upon initial Customer creation. In production, you may run into an instance where more information is needed from your end user in order for Dwolla to fully verify their identity. Other statuses your Customer may be placed in include, retry, document, deactivated, or suspended. For more information on these statuses, refer to our developer resource article.

Balance Funding Source #

On successful Customer verification, Dwolla will also create a Balance Funding Source for this Customer.