Documentation

Financial institutions can send official instructions to Column requesting Column send an outgoing wire according to set instructions. Column refers to this request as a "wire drawdown request." Other institutions may refer to this process as sending a "reverse wire." Wire drawdowns are used for common use cases such as payroll processing and network settlement for card programs. In these cases, Column is the originating financial institution (ODFI) and the financial institution who sent the drawdown request and receives funds is the receiving financial institution (RDFI).

Wire Drawdown Workflow

Wire drawdowns have a workflow with two distinct legs.

1. A financial institution will send a wire drawdown request to Column. This request contains information to help Column customers approve or ignore the request, including: requested amount, the Column bank account from which funds will be sent, and the external account to which Column will send funds upon request approval.
2. The wire drawdown request can be approved via our API or simply ignored. If the wire drawdown request is approved, Column will initiate an outgoing wire in accordance with the instructions specified in the incoming request. If ignored, nothing will happen.

Responding to a Drawdown Request

When Column receives a wire drawdown request for a bank account on your platform, we will emit a webhook for wire.incoming_drawdown_request.received which contains the Wire Drawdown Request Object. If you are polling for events, this will also be returned in our Events API. The object contains all information you need to approve or ignore the request. Typically, you should ensure the Column bank account owner and the institution making the drawdown request have an agreement in place to accept and process wire drawdowns.

If you decide to honor the drawdown request, you should call our API, Approving a Drawdown Request. Once you approve the drawdown request, Column will automatically create an outgoing wire according to the instructions in the request. If there are insufficient funds in the account to honor the drawdown, the approval call will fail with an insufficient funds error unless you specifically allow overdrafts in the approval API call.

If you do not want to honor the request, simply do nothing and ignore the incoming request.

SLAs Around Responding to a Wire Drawdown Request

There are no industry standard SLAs around responding to a wire drawdown request. However, the institution requesting the wire drawdown does typically have expectations around time lapsed between a request and receipt of the corresponding wire.

Notifications and States

A wire drawdown may have the following status received, approved, denied, completed, rejected. If the drawdown request is ignored, the status will remain received. Should a wire drawdown be approved or denied, the status will be updated accordingly. Upon approval of a wire drawdown, a wire transfer is automatically created and the wire_transfer_id is provided in the wire drawdown object. Similarly, the wire_drawdown_request_id is provided in the wire transfer object. Should the wire transfer complete successfully, the wire drawdown status will be completed. Should the wire transfer be rejected, the wire drawdown status will be rejected.

The below are the states and events a wire drawdown request may go through.

Sending Wire Drawdowns

Column has the capability to send outgoing wire drawdowns to external financial institutions to request funds be paid to an account at Column. For outgoing requests, the process above is reversed and Column will send a request to the external financial institution to request funds.

There are two additional statuses for outgoing drawdown requests. When Column first receives the request, the initial status will be initiated and then will transition to sent once the request is transmitted to Fedwire. Depending on the reply from the external financial institution, it will then transition to either rejected or completed. If the drawdown is approved, the completed drawdown request will contain the wire_transfer_id of the incoming wire.

Since there are no industry standard SLAs around drawdowns, it is possible that the external financial institution may ignore or fail to respond if the request is rejected. In this case, the request will remain in the sent state at Column.

At this time, Column does not support originating wire drawdowns with payment instructions to an account outside of Column. Please get in touch if this is a feature that you would find useful!

The below are the states and events an outgoing wire drawdown request may go through.